At the Sign of Triumph (Safehold)

.XI.

Forward Lines,

Holy Langhorne Band,

Talmar,

Westmarch Province,

Republic of Siddarmark.

The tornado of heavy angle-gun shells crunched through 2nd Company’s trenches and bunkers like Shan-wei’s brimstone boots. Some of those shells were far heavier than anything the Army of God had ever experienced before. They drove deep into the earth when they hit, and the craters they blew could have swallowed entire platoons. Smoke, flying dirt, dust, shell splinters, and bits and pieces of what had been the defensive abatises were everywhere, sizzling through the air at lethal velocities.

That was bad enough, but one of those heavier shells had landed directly on the roof of Captain Tymythy Lynkyn’s command bunker. The bunker’s depth would probably have defeated one of the 6-inch angle-guns. Unfortunately, what hit it was a shell from one of the new 8-inch guns, three times as heavy and with four times the bursting charge. Even it failed to completely penetrate the bunker, but it exploded so deep that the bunker collapsed. Only three men got out alive, and Captain Lynkyn wasn’t one of them.

* * *

“Captain’s dead, Sir!” Sergeant Lynyrd bawled in Lieutenant Ahdymsyn’s ear. He had to shout, even inside the bunker, to be heard over the howling bedlam outside it. “So’s Lieutenant Sedryk! Means you’re in command!”

Hyrbyrt Ahdymsyn turned from the horrific, hellish panorama of his bunker’s view slit to look at his platoon sergeant in disbelief. He was the senior officer on the position? Impossible!

But Lynyrd twitched his head at the exhausted, bloodstained corporal standing beside him, and Ahdymsyn recognized Captain Lynkyn’s senior clerk. He couldn’t begin to imagine how the man had made it from the company HQ bunker through the holocaust raging across the position, but the noncom’s expression told him it wasn’t impossible at all.

The earth shook and trembled, quivering like a frightened animal as the torrent of shells ripped and gouged. The heretics’ bombardment had begun an hour after dawn, after the men had finished the regular dawn stand-to and just had time to settle in to their breakfast chow lines. It had struck with no warning at all, with no intimation that they’d somehow managed to haul their artillery train forward and deploy it behind their screen of mounted infantry and scout snipers. It had come shrieking down out of a beautiful blue sky with mountainous white clouds, and its fury was a living, breathing monster, rampaging through the company’s position and snatching men—his men, some of them—into its fiery maw. He couldn’t believe the sheer accuracy of their fire. All the lectures he’d attended in training, everything he’d heard on the endless journey from Zion to the front, had warned him heretic artillery was more accurate, longer arranged, and more … flexible than Mother Church’s. But this—!

“Any orders, Sir?” Lynyrd asked.

“There aren’t any orders to give, Sergeant,” Ahdymsyn retorted. “Our job’s to hold this position, and that’s what we’re frigging well going to do! But we can’t put the boys out into the trenches while this is coming down on them.” He jabbed a finger at the smoke and dust swirling in through the view slit. “They know what to do when the artillery lifts, and I’m not about to send you or anybody else out into that kind of fire—” he smiled briefly but warmly at the corporal who’d had the guts to send himself out into it to tell him he’d inherited command “—to tell them anything else!”

“Can’t say I disagree with that, Sir.” Lynyrd managed his own smile. “But I’m thinking we’ll need reinforcements. We’re gonna be a lot shorter handed than anyone thought when the Colonel was handing out responsibilities.”

“If we are, we are,” Ahdymsyn said flatly. “I doubt we could even get a wyvern off to tell him we need help—or that the poor thing would live to get there through this frigging fire. On the other hand,” he surprised himself with an actual chuckle, “the heretics’re making enough noise I expect he’ll figure it out!”

* * *

“Up another hundred yards,” Sergeant Hahskyn said crisply, watching the crest line on the far side of the valley vanish under a forest of explosions.

“Up a hundred,” Ahlgood repeated, making certain of the correction.

“Yes,” Hahskyn confirmed. “They’re almost exactly on for deflection.”

“Got it,” Ahlgood said, scribbling the information onto the message form, then leaned over the gondola rail to hook the message capsule to the taut wire between it and the winch-wagon. He released it, it went flashing down the wire with a shrill, metallic whine, and he picked up his own, lighter double-glass to look over Hahskyn’s shoulder.

The reorganized angle-gun batteries contained only half as many pieces as their field artillery counterparts, but Sahmantha was spotting for an entire battalion of 8-inch angles. Those guns had reduced their sector of the Temple Boy fortifications to threshed and smoking ruin, even firing from positions three miles west of their balloon, although neither of them were foolish enough to think the destruction was as complete as it looked.

Like the rest of the Balloon Corps’ observers, they’d been given firsthand experience of the effects of heavy angle-gunfire. They’d trained here in the Republic, at Camp Raif Mahgail, the huge base the ICA had built on a stretch of Tanshar Bay coast in Transhar Province. Camp Mahgail was isolated enough, with sufficiently ruthless security, for them to exercise with their balloon without worrying about reports reaching the Temple, and it also housed a major artillery training ground. The balloon crews had been able to walk the fortifications Charisian engineers had produced to give the gun dogs realistic targets. As a result, they knew the AOG’s defensive positions were almost certainly far more intact than they appeared to be. On the other hand, they were one hell of a lot less intact than they’d been when the sun rose, and the 6-inch angles currently finishing the abatises’ demolition would shift to what remained of the dugouts and rifle pits when the engineers started forward to clear the footstool fields.

At the moment, the 8-inchers had a different job.

The Temple Boy planners had obviously counted on concealment to protect their rocket launchers, parking them on the far side of hills to take advantage of their high-angle trajectories. Some of them had been separated from one another by earthen berms, but Hahskyn doubted that had been to protect them from Allied artillery. It was much more likely those berms were intended to keep an accident in one launcher battery from taking out its neighbors. God knew the ICA’s rocket launchers—which their spy reports said were much more reliable than anything the Temple had—could be sufficiently … exciting to fire, so accidental explosions were probably a very real possibility.

Whoever was in command of this part of the Temple’s front was no dummy, though. He must have realized almost immediately what the Balloon Corps implied, because for the last day or two Ahlgood had spotted—and reported—frenetic efforts to give those launchers better protection. Obviously, they’d still have to come out into the open to actually fire, but like their Charisian counterparts, they’d been adapted from freight wagons. So enormous labor parties had been throwing together redoubts in which the wagons could be parked under thick, heavily sandbagged overhead protection until needed and then rolled out when it was time to fire.

Unfortunately for them, it was hard to produce overhead protection that could stop a 200-pound shell when it came howling down at fourteen hundred feet per second. It could be done—Hahskyn had seen examples of that during his artillery familiarization training, too—but not without a lot more depth than they could throw up in the time they had. A little concrete and some of the Delthak Works’ new flange-beams wouldn’t have hurt, either. With the materials and tools they had, there simply wasn’t enough time, and he waited, watching through cold, merciless eyes, as the gun dogs of the 23rd Medium Artillery Battalion, Imperial Charisian Army, adjusted their elevation and fired.

Twenty-three seconds after that, sixteen 8-inch shells exploded in a tightly grouped pattern on the far side of the crest line which had been supposed to hide the Holy Martyrs Division’s rocket launchers from its enemies.

“Yesssssss!” Hahskyn hissed triumphantly as at least two of those launchers disintegrated in stupendous fireballs.

Some of the rockets actually launched, shrieking up out of the devastation like damned souls with no guidance, no direction. Three of them came down again almost on top of the bunkers and trenches being pounded by the lighter angle-guns. Two of them, though, headed directly towards Talmar. They lacked the range to reach the deserted town … but they had enough to hit the paddocks in which Holy Martyrs’ draft animals were being held.

The resulting carnage was far worse, in a way, than what was happening to those dragons’ and mules’ human masters, because no one could explain it to them. They shrieked in terror as devastation crashed down on them. Already spooked by the savage, unending concussions of the Charisian bombardment, they panicked and tried to stampede. Many of the paddock fences went down; some of them didn’t, and scores more of the animals were trampled to death by their frantic fellows as windrows of bodies formed along the obstruction.

“Tell them they’re right on!” Hahskyn said. “When they correct again, they’ll want to move their point of impact about three hundred yards north. Tell them we’ll notify them when the current target’s neutralized.”

“Maintain fire on the current elevation and deflection. Prepare to adjust north three hundred yards,” Ahlgood repeated.

“Exactly.”

Hahskyn heard the message go shrilling down the wire, but he never looked away from his double-glass. He did shift his focus briefly, however, and his smile was colder and thinner than ever as he studied the Temple Boys dug in artillery. He doubted their gunners were as good as the ICA’s at the best of time, but that didn’t matter right now, since their weapons were clearly shorter ranged. They’d attempted to counter battery the Army of Westmarch’s artillery, but the few rounds they’d fired—blindly; without Sahmantha, they couldn’t even see the Charisian gun flashes—had fallen far short of the Charisian gun pits. Hahskyn never doubted that right now they were hunkered down in the deepest protection they could find, riding out the holocaust until the inevitable Charisian attack came into their reach.

Unfortunately, their guns were well inside the range of the medium and heavy Charisian angles. The airborne Charisian spotters and observers were working their methodical way from the closest targets to those farthest away, and as soon as the 23rd Medium Artillery finished with the rocket launchers, it would be the Temple gun line’s turn.

* * *

“Just about time, Sir,” Colonel Sailys Trahskhat said.

Brigadier Byrk Raimahn looked up from the map he’d been contemplating while he stuffed the bowl of his pipe. The brigadier couldn’t have said why he was studying it, really. It was far too late to change any of his plans, much less the orders he’d already issued. It was just part of the way he was put together, this need to stand here, looking at the map, wondering what he could’ve done differently … better. He snorted at his own perversity and wondered again—briefly—how in God’s name he’d ended up here.

When he shaved every morning, the face in his mirror wasn’t so very different from the man—the boy, really, in a lot of ways—he’d seen in that same mirror before the Sword of Schueler swept over Siddar City’s Charisian Quarter in a tide of blood, fire, and rapine. But that had been two and a half years—and about three lifetimes—ago, and the eyes … The eyes were different, and he wondered if they’d ever lose that darkness? That memory of what their owner had seen and done in those lifetimes?

He finished filling the pipe, drew a fire striker from his pocket to fire up the tobacco, and suddenly found himself chuckling with genuine humor. Someone—he suspected Sailys—had informed his grandmother that he’d taken up the vile Glacierheart custom of smoking. She’d apparently missed the fact that Charisians in plenty had smoked long before the Raimahns moved to Siddarmark to escape the heresy, which was odd, since his grandfather had smoked for several decades before he gave up the “unholy weed,” as Sahmantha Raimahn was prone to call it.

She and Claitahn Raimahn had returned to their homeland after the Siddar City riots. It hadn’t been easy for them—especially for Claitahn, whose principles and faith were just a little more rugged than the Mountains of Light—to admit the validity of the Church of Charis’ charges against the Group of Four. But the same principles and faith which had made him a Temple Loyalist had left him no choice when Zhaspahr Clyntahn’s fiery sermons actually praised the Sword of Schueler’s barbarity. When he and his wife arrived home in Tellesberg with Sailys Trahskhat’s children and sixty other Charisian and Siddarmarkian orphans in tow, he’d gone directly to Tellesberg Cathedral to tell Maikel Staynair, the man he’d blamed for so long for so much, that he’d been wrong.

Two-thirds of the fortune he’d spent a lifetime building had been lost between the Charisian investments he’d liquidated when he moved to the Republic and the carnage the Republic had suffered afterward. But he’d pledged a full half of everything he had left to aid Charisian and Siddarmarkian refugees from the mainland. Today, he was chief administrator not just for the Church of Charis’ enormous orphanages but for all of the Church’s war-related charities, and his wife was as deeply immersed in that effort as he was.

None of which had prevented her from finding time to send the grandson she’d raised a scathing appraisal of men who smoked. She’d even included half a dozen Pasqualate tracts about the health hazards of tobacco.

Well, if kicking the smoking habit is the only thing she’s going to demand when I finally get home, Byrk thought, savoring the aromatic smoke, I imagine she’ll get it. She usually does get what she wants, after all.

“I suppose that if it’s time, we should probably head out,” he said through a wreath of smoke in a casual tone which he knew fooled neither of them.

“S’pose so, Sir,” Trahskhat agreed with equally false nonchalance, and Byrk reached out to pat him on the shoulder with a broad smile.

The two of them had been through a lot in those three lifetimes since the Sword of Schueler, he thought. Sailys was still the stocky, powerfully built first baseman he’d once been, but strands of silver threaded through his brown hair now. His face carried the scars of frostbite from their first brutal winter in Glacierheart, and he walked with ever so slight a limp, courtesy of a Temple Boy bayonet at the storm of Fort Tairys. And the changes inside him were as profound as those inside Byrk Raimahn. The brigadier knew Sailys Trahskhat could never, in his wildest imagination, have pictured himself as a colonel, and especially not a colonel in the Siddarmarkian Army! Yet here he was. And here, for that matter, was Byrk Raimahn, who’d celebrated his twenty-third birthday just last five-day, which made him the youngest brigadier in the entire Republic of Siddarmark Army. For that matter, he was younger than any brigadier in the Charisian Army.

This is crazy, he thought for no more than the six-thousandth time. I write songs, I don’t command brigades! God must have an even stranger sense of humor than I ever imagined.

Perhaps He did, but Glacierhearters didn’t. They were as pragmatic, as stubborn, and as tough as their mountains, and they’d decided the over-civilized young sprout who’d commanded the riflemen escorting their beloved archbishop back to them and then fought for months to hold the Green Cove Trace was one of their own. Just as they’d decided they owed a debt to Charis when Brigadier Mahrtyn Taisynand his Marines died to the man protecting their families from the atrocities Cahnyr Kaitswyrth’s oncoming army had strewn in its wake. Their province had been more sparsely populated than most of the Republic even before the Sword of Schueler ‘s “Starving Winter,” but they’d raised an entire fourth regiment of militia and sent it off to fight at Charis’ side. Not only that, they’d specifically petitioned the Lord Protector to allow their regiment to fight under Charisian command until the end.

Greyghor Stohnar had granted their request, and the four regiments had been organized into a single brigade. But that brigade had needed a commander … and militia units’ officers were appointed by the provincial government of the province which raised them. Which was how a Charisian boy whose first love had always been music had become the youngest brigadier in the history of the world.

It still bemused him, but perhaps it was fitting that he wasn’t exactly the standard version of a brigadier, because his command was far from “standard” itself.

The RSA had retained its long-standing unit structure when it reorganized around the new-model weapons, but it had formalized the practice of consolidating the thirty-man sections of its pike companies into sixty-man platoons. They’d always tended to operate the doubled sections as single tactical units, anyway, except under very special circumstances, and many of the Army’s officers had felt the rationalization was overdue even before the new weapons were added to the mix. So now there were seven platoons in each company, although Byrk had never really understood why the Siddarmarkians didn’t just go ahead and call the companies “battalions,” like anyone else would have. Tradition, he supposed. But by permanently combining the sections, they’d cut the number of lieutenants in each company in half. Well, almost in half. The single section of the headquarters group remained only thirty men strong but was still a lieutenant’s command.

The Glacierheart Brigade had operated so long and so intimately with its Charisian allies that it was fully equipped with Charisian equipment—including the M96 rifle and Mahldyn .45 revolvers—and had adopted Charisian doctrine and tactics. But it followed the Siddarmarkian pattern as far as unit organization was concerned—which made it slightly larger than a standard, two-regiment Charisian brigade—and its men came almost equally from the ranks of the trappers and hunters who roamed the Gray Walls’ majestic, snowcapped summits and the hard-as-rock miners who wrested the coal from those mountains’ stubborn bones. It would have been difficult to say which group was tougher, despite many a knuckle-and-skull “empirical experiment” to find out. But that orientation—the self-reliance, woodcraft, and hunting skills of the trappers, coupled with the engineering background, teamwork, and explosive expertise of the miners—made them uniquely suited to combine the functions of the ICA’s scout snipers and combat engineers.

And that explained their present assignment.

The Mighty Host’s fortifications were a battlefield challenge—in degree, if not actually in kind—no one had yet faced. But the Allies had known it was coming … and spent a great deal of thought, time, and effort on ways to meet it. The Balloon Corps and new artillery were part of that answer, yet the ICA’s gunners had realized that heavy artillery’s pulverizing effect could actually hinder an attack as much as it helped. As Baron Green Valley had pointed out, artillery’s function was to open a path for the infantry, not to simply churn a battlefield with ton after ton of shells. That was entirely too likely to create conditions in which the infantry floundered forward through muck and mire at a snail’s pace while defending riflemen picked them off like roosting wyverns.

Given the current dry, sunny weather, seas of mud weren’t very likely, but the army still needed a way to carry heavily fortified positions without simply relying on artillery to shatter them. So doctrine had been modified yet again. ICA tactics had always emphasized—and depended upon—the initiative of company and platoon commanders. They were told what to do, then figured out how to do it with a degree of flexibility no other army could match. Not even the RSA, which had spent the last two years absorbing what its Allies had to teach it and who came closer than anyone else, could fully equal that responsive adaptability or the mindset that made it work.

Byrk Raimahn’s Glacierhearters could, however, and Duke Eastshare, who’d seen them at work in the Fort Tairys campaign, had specifically chosen them as the core and test bed for the Army of Westmarch’s new assault brigades. They’d worked closely with the ICA’s combat engineers, artillerists, and scout snipers, to formulate the new doctrine, and they’d suggested dozens of pragmatic improvements along the way. Three of Eastshare’s other brigades had drawn the same equipment, undergone the same training, but the Glacierheart Brigade had established the training syllabus for them all. Now it was up to its officers and men to see how well all that planning, all that equipment, actually worked. Byrk’s men were proud to have been chosen … and Byrk was only too well aware of how many of them might be about to die if it turned out the new doctrine didn’t work.

“Morning, Sir,” another voice said, and he looked up with a smile.

“Morning, Wahlys,” he replied, and clasped forearms with Colonel Wahlys Mahkhom, who’d inherited command of the 1st Glacierheart Volunteers following Byrk’s promotion.

If anyone in the world was more bemused by where he’d wound up than Sailys or himself, the brigadier reflected, it had to be Mahkhom. In retrospect, it had been inevitable, though. Always a natural leader, he’d been one of the first to begin organizing Glacierheart to resist the Sword of Schueler. He’d been instrumental in holding the Gray Walls against the onslaught from the Province of Hildermoss, and he’d exacted a savage price from the Temple Loyalists who’d slaughtered his entire family. And while he’d clearly been astonished by his promotion, he’d shouldered it with the same solid determination with which he shouldered every responsibility. In fact, meeting the challenge of his new rank seemed to have helped lay at least some of his demons.

He had more than enough of them left to visit carnage and ruination on the Temple Boys, though, Byrk thought, feeling the power of the older man’s clasp.

“Your boys ready?” Byrk asked … unnecessarily, he knew.

“Might say we are,” Mahkhom replied … equally unnecessarily.

“Then go.” Byrk smiled crookedly around the stem of his pipe. “And don’t get yourself shot! If they won’t let me go gadding about out there with the boys, then I’m not letting you get yourself killed, either. Understand me?”

“Not rightly sure what ‘gadding’ is,” Mahkhom replied, scratching his beard with a thoughtful air. “Sounds like somethin’ you shouldn’t be doin’ if you’re not married t’ the girl, though.”

“That’s exactly what it is,” Byrk told him with a chuckle, and punched his upper arm gently. “But I mean it, Wahlys. I’d really like to get all of you back, but we both know that isn’t going to happen. Try not to be one of the ones we don’t.”

“If I can,” Mahkhom told him much more quietly. “Happen the gun dogs and the balloon boys’ve made sure there’ll be more of us after, this time around.”

“We can always hope. Now, go. And since Archbishop Zhasyn can’t be here to say it himself, I’ll say it for him. May God go with all of you.”

* * *

All right,” Major Sygfryd Makwyrt growled, raising his voice to be heard by his platoon commanders over the distant artillery and the thud of the mortars closer to hand. They’d been laying smoke to cover the combat engineers lifting the footstools in the Glacierheart Brigade’s front; now they were laying more of it to cover the brigade itself.

“You all know what we’re supposed t’ do,” Makwyrt continued. “Go out there, do it, and kick arse. Just make damned sure you stay in the cleared lanes till you hit the abatis, right?”

A chorus of assents came back, and he nodded sharply and pointed towards the front. They trotted off to join their platoons, and Makwyrt turned to Colonel Mahkhom.

“Wasn’t much of what th’ Brigadier calls a ‘detailed briefing,’ Sygfryd,” the colonel observed as the two of them followed the lieutenants a bit more sedately.

“Heard a ‘briefing’ or two of yours, over the years,” Makwyrt replied. “Least I used more’n three words and a grunt.”

“Just didn’t want t’ dazzle ’em with my eloquence.”

“Ha! Can’t fool me. Learned that one from the Brigadier, didn’t you?”

“Learned quite a few things from the Brigadier over the years, actually,” Mahkhom said much more seriously. “Reckon all of us did. Try to bear that in mind, right?”

“Right.”

They’d reached the start line, and Makwyrt gave him a firm arm clasp, waved for his command group, and his runners started forward. Mahkhom watched him go, then pulled out his pocket watch and checked the time. Another ten minutes till the barrage lifted, he thought. He and his own command group would be going in directly behind 1st Company, and he nodded to young Lieutenant Zhaikahbsyn whose 6th Platoon had been given the unenviable task of bringing up the rear … and watching the Colonel’s arse.

“Lainyl,” he greeted the lieutenant. “You boys ready?”

“Yes, Sir!” Lainyl Zhaikahbsyn replied fiercely.

“Well, just remember the idea’s that the other fella’s s’posed t’ be the one that dies,” Mahkhom said dryly.

A memory of a younger Wahlys Mahkhom in the Green Cove Trace flashed through him as he said it, but he made himself push that memory aside. Archbishop Zhasyn was right. Mahrlyn would have wanted him to live, and despite the pain that still sometimes threatened to drag him under, he meant to do what she would have wanted. And he also meant to keep as many of these young Glacierheart men alive for their wives and families as he could.

Maybe that could compensate—a bit—for some of the other things he’d done in the last couple of years.

“Yes, Sir,” Zhaikahbsyn said in a slightly more subdued tone.

“Good lad!” Mahkhom clouted him on the shoulder, then twitched his head for his runners to follow him.

* * *

Hyrbyrt Ahdymsyn crouched at the head of the bunker stairs, stinging eyes leaking tears as he peered into the smoke. He’d sent a runner to Colonel Flymyng during the first lull in the heretics’ shelling … just in time to have it resume, exactly the way the Dohlaran reports Captain Lynkyn had shared with them had described. Ahdymsyn knew he’d be a long time forgiving himself for not waiting a little longer before sending Private Shandahsky off. He should’ve remembered those reports. He had remembered them; he simply hadn’t had time to wait. Colonel Flymyng had to know what had happened to 2nd Company—and how badly it needed reinforcements—and he had to know as soon as possible.

I still should have waited, he thought grimly. I knew it then, too.

A stubborn voice that sounded a lot like Captain Lynkyn’s told him he was wrong. Told him a military commander had to accept that men would die following his orders. Had to send them out knowing they were going to die, if the mission required it. But Hyrbyrt Ahdymsyn was still a very young man, and one who cared, and he’d discovered he didn’t have whatever hardness or determination it took to accept that cold, bitter truth.

“More trouble, Sir,” a voice said, and Ahdymsyn turned his head as Owyn Lynyrd reemerged from the foul-smelling ocean of smoke floating across his company’s splintered position.

Ahdymsyn had sent the sergeant out fifteen minutes ago to survey what was left of that position, and he felt a vast surge of relief that he’d gotten back in one piece. But then—

“Just got a runner from Third Company,” Lynyrd continued. “Captain Rychardo’s dead, too. And so’re Lieutenant Traivyr and Lieutenant Charlz.”

“What?” Ahdymsyn stared at him in consternation. “All three of them?!”

“Yes, Sir,” Lynyrd confirmed grimly. “They were out of their bunkers, walking the position together—crawling it, really, I guess—when the heretic guns opened up again. Single shell got all three of ’em. And Lieutenant Zhaksyn was already wounded. That leaves Lieutenant Pahtyrfyld as company commander.” The sergeant managed a mirthless smile. “Sent a runner to let you know who’s holding your right, I guess, Sir.”

Langhorne, Ahdymsyn thought numbly. Two companies both commanded by their most junior lieutenants? If Second and Third are this bad off, what the hell’s happened to the rest of the Regiment?!

“I see,” he said out loud, and twitched his head in the direction of the fighting trenches. “How bad?” he asked.

“Pretty damned bad, Sir,” Lynyrd replied frankly. “Wasn’t able to get all the way forward, but from what I could see of the second abatis, there can’t be a whole hell of a lot left of the first one. Bastards were putting shells exactly where they wanted ’em, and they ripped the shit out of the obstacles and the trenches. Second line’s close enough to in one piece we can probably man it; first line has to be just about completely gone, and they’re dropping portable angle shells all along the hillcrest. Got a mess of shrapnel and explosive mixed in with the smoke, too. We’d probably lose a third of the boys we’ve got left just getting to the first line. Only good news is that we got just about everybody out of there before the really heavy shelling started.”

Ahdymsyn nodded. Earl Rainbow Waters’ new tactics specifically called for pulling back from the exposed trench line during the artillery bombardment and then reoccupying it once the shelling lifted, and despite the pounding 2nd Company had endured, he knew its casualties would have been far worse if the men had been out in the open during the hurricane bombardment. The question was whether or not he applied the rest of the new tactics. Did he move back forward to man the forward trench lines, or did he concede those and concentrate on the final line, here by the bunkers.

He listened to the heretic shells, continuing to fall not on 2nd Company’s position, but behind it, laying down a wall of fire and steel to prevent the division reserve from coming to his support, and his mouth was a grim, hard line.

Owyn’s right, he told himself coldly, the first line almost has to be gone. Oh, I could probably get the boys into it—and back out, any of them that survived—without losing as many to the portable angles as he’s suggesting. That’s what the communication trenches are for, and they can’t all have been taken out! But we were only supposed to hold it until the reserve came up, and that’s not going to happen with those damned shells ripping hell out of the lateral roads behind us. Besides, I don’t have enough men left to man it even if it’s still there!So that only leaves the lines on this side of the valley, and I don’t have enough men left to man both of them, either.

The forward line had less overhead protection even before the heretics kicked the crap out of us, but it also has the better field of fire up to the eastern crest. Visibility sucks with all this smoke, but the heretics have to ease up on the shelling, even with their portable angles, if they’re sending in their own infantry. So we might still have a chance to catch them silhouetted when they come over the crest.

All of that was true, but deep inside, he knew the real reason he wasn’t going to man that forward line.

If I put them that far forward and the bastards start shelling us again, I’ll lose half the boys I’ve got left before they make it back to their bunkers.

He couldn’t do that. He just … couldn’t.

“Turn them out, Owyn,” he said. “We don’t have enough men for the original defense plan, and Colonel Flymyng and Bishop Militant Styvyn won’t get any reinforcements to us through that.” He jabbed one thumb over his shoulder at the curtain of death thundering between his men and the rest of the Holy Langhorne Band. “We’ll make our stand here on the bunker line. And be sure we’ve got plenty of hand-bombs forward. In all this smoke, they’ll probably have as much range as our rifles do.”

* * *

“Hsssst! Right here, Sir—an’ watch your feet!” Corporal Tymyns hissed.

Lieutenant Greyghor Ohygyns, CO, 2nd Platoon, 1st Company, the 1st Glacierheart Volunteers, froze. Zackery Tymyns, the assistant squad leader of Sergeant Braisyn Mahktavysh’s 1st Squad, was well into his forties—the next best thing to a septuagenarian from Ohygyns’ perspective. He was also shrewd, solid, steady, and unflappable, however, and he’d have been an officer himself if he hadn’t been the next best thing to functionally illiterate. If Tymyns wanted him to be careful with his feet, then he’d damned well be careful with his feet!

“Good, Sir!” Tymyns emerged from the smoke with a gap-toothed grin. “Got our markers, Sir, an’ Braisyn said t’ tell you the engineers did us proud. Got a clear path marked clear through the first belt. Only they’s a passel of footstools kinda stacked t’ the sides, so it’s best you stay t’ the middle of the path.”

“I appreciate that, Zackery,” Ohygyns said. “No telling where I would have put my feet as I went strolling along whistling and drinking a beer.”

“’S why I’m here, Sir, t’ keep you out of trouble,” Tymyns replied with an even broader grin, and Ohygyns shook his head. Then he looked over his shoulder at Klymynt Ohtuhl, his platoon sergeant.

“Pass the word back, Klymynt,” he said much more seriously. “Single file from here, and we stay right in the middle of the tapes!”

“Got it,” Ohtuhl acknowledged with typical Glacierheart informality, and Ohygyns started forward once more, following closely on Tymyns’ heels.

The “crump, crump, crump” of bursting smoke rounds rolled steadily back from the west, getting louder as they came closer. There were no shrapnel or explosive rounds in the smoke falling on this side of the crest line—or their damned well weren’t supposed to be—and the combat engineers had cleared several lanes through the belt of footstools.

He passed a couple of motionless bodies in Charisian uniforms, and his mouth tightened. Those engineers had paid a price to accomplish their task, yet he knew that price had been infinitesimal compared to what it would have been without the massive artillery support they’d received, and the smoke had probably been even more valuable than the high explosive and the shrapnel. The engineers had trained to find and lift the footstools in total darkness—for that matter, the Glacierheart Volunteers had trained to do it, as well—but that was always tricky, and too often costly. That was why the infantry support squads’ mortar crews had hauled such vast numbers of smoke bombs forward with them. With the rifles covering the footstool fields blinded, the engineers had been able to go about their dangerous work in daylight.

Of course, there’s always the second belt on the other side of the hill, he reminded himself, but the engineers were supposed to be working on that at that very moment.

He reached the crest and found Sergeant Mahktavysh waiting with the rest of 1st Squad spread out to either side, heads up and weapons ready.

“Good to see you, Braisyn,” he said.

“And you, Sir. See Zackery got you here in one piece.”

“So far, at least. What’s the situation down below?”

“Don’t rightly know yet, Sir. Still waiting for—”

“Cahnyr!” one of the riflemen barked suddenly, and the sergeant broke off.

“Staynair!” came back, and the private who’d challenged relaxed—slightly at least—as he was answered with the proper counter.

“Come on in,” he called, and a figure materialized out of the smoke.

The engineer sergeant was very careful about how he approached Mahktavysh’s ready riflemen, despite the invitation. Then he saw Ohygyns and trotted briskly over to him and saluted.

“Got a lane clear to the obstacle belt for you, Lieutenant,” he said.

“Good!” Ohygyns nodded, and turned as Platoon Sergeant Ohtuhl arrived along with Sergeant Tymythy Ohlyry’s 2nd Squad.

“Fourth and Fifth’re right behind us, Sir,” Ohtuhl said, indulging in what was an orgy of formality for him.

“Then I reckon it’s time we follow the sergeant here—” Ohygyns indicated the engineer “—and get down to it.”

* * *

Lieutenant Ahdymsyn and his remaining men manned their positions while portable angle-gun shells continued to thud about them. The protective bays in the front walls of their trenches, coupled with what remained of the overhead sandbags, provided reasonable cover against the small shells’ sprays of shrapnel. It would be another matter if one of the explosive rounds landed directly in one of the trenches, but that was unlikely, despite the weight of fire still coming at them.

At least they weren’t being scourged by the devastating fire of the heretics’ heavy angles any longer. Ahdymsyn was grateful for that, but it was a very mixed blessing. The only reason the heavy guns would have stopped pounding them had to be because the heretic infantry was moving in for the kill.

I wish to hell we had a frigging breeze! Something to move the damned smoke along.

The smokescreen was like the worst fog he’d ever seen—ever imagined—and at least half the portable angle-gun shells falling on his position were solely to replenish the smoke any time it even looked like thinning. And that meant—

* * *

As nearly as Lieutenant Ohygyns could tell—which wasn’t nearly as well as he would have preferred to tell, thanks to the lifesaving smoke which had gotten them this far—2nd Platoon was where it was supposed to be … give or take a few dozen yards. The large-scale maps prepared by the Balloon Corps’ cartography section had helped enormously in the initial approach, but once 2nd Platoon entered the cratered wilderness of the main bombardment zone, they’d become a lot less useful. There didn’t seem to be any recognizable landmarks or topographic features anymore, and he’d been forced to hope the engineers had managed to maintain their bearings as they cleared the footstools.

He’d been surprised to find the Temple Boys’ second trench unmanned when they reached it. It had been hammered almost as badly as the first one, and it was more than half-collapsed in many places, but he’d been impressed, when he slithered down into the trench, revolver in hand, by how well it had held up, all things considered. It would still have offered a daunting fighting position, and some of the craters behind and in front of it were deep enough to have offered very effective improvised defensive points to support it.

His Glacierhearters had found some bodies and even a couple of wounded who might survive if 1st Company’s healers got to them in time, but it was obvious the Temple Boys had pulled back from this trench, as well as the first, almost the instant the bombardment began. Well, that was only sensible. Ohygyns didn’t even want to think about how he would have reacted with every heavy angle in the world dropping shells on top of him. But they hadn’t moved back into it when the heavy shellfire lifted, either.

First Platoon had filtered out of the narrow lane the engineers had cleared, climbed cautiously across the shattered but still formidable abates … and found no one waiting for them. They’d been able to spread out along the abandoned trench, gathering their full strength without having to fight their way into it, and that had been a priceless boom. Now Ahbnair Mahkneel’s 4th Platoon had come up to join them, Zheppsyn Mahkwaiyr’s 5th Platoon was on Mahkneel’s heels, and the trench was almost as defensible from the west as it had been from the east. Whatever else happened, letting the better part of two hundred Glacierhearters establish a secure foothold in their lines was a serious mistake on the Temple Boys’ part, because they’d play hell pushing the company back out of it again.

Not going to happen, he thought coldly, listening to the background rumble of artillery and the quieter crumping sounds of smoke rounds landing less than three hundred yards in front of them. Any pushing that gets done around here’ll be going the other way!

Major Makwyrt was coming up with the 5th, but he wasn’t here yet. Besides, he wasn’t the sort to reach for the reins even if he had been. This was Ohygyn’s responsibility, and he checked his watch again. Timing wasn’t really all that critical, given the nature of the assault plan and what must have already happened to the poor damned Temple Boys in front of them. The fact that it wasn’t critical didn’t mean that it wasn’t important, however. Second and 3rd Companies were moving up to assault the sectors to either side of 1st Company’s, and they were supposed to go in as close to together as they could. On the other hand, they were already six minutes past the designated time. Not surprisingly, given all the uncertainties involved in their approach. But he was here now, and somebody had to open the ball …

He closed the watch case with a snap, drew his revolver, made sure the speedloaders in the case on his left hip were secure, and nodded to Platoon Sergeant Ohtuhl.

“Go,” he said simply, and Ohtuhl pulled the rocket’s priming ring.

A standard flare pistol would almost certainly have gotten the job done, but Brigadier Raimahn wasn’t a great believer in “almost certainly.” He’d wanted something he was positive would be visible above the smoke and dust raised by the Charisian artillery and support squads, and the signal rocket soared upwards and burst at an altitude of several hundred feet.

* * *

“Flare!” Sergeant Hahskyn snapped.

He swung his bracket-mounted double-glass quickly to take a bearing on it.

“It’s one of ours,” he said as the bearing confirmed it was in Sahmantha’s sector. “Orange, and right about in the middle of Golf Three!”

“Orange at Golf Three,” Ahlgood confirmed, and Hahskyn nodded sharply.

The observer drew a deep breath. He believed the people who told him what he was about to do was actually safe—he really did! Any hydrogen that leaked would have risen well above the gondola. There wasn’t really any chance of igniting the huge floating bomb above them. Really there wasn’t.

He fought down the temptation to close his eyes and reached for the flare pistol.

A moment later, three orange flares arced away from Sahmantha and burst one-by-one, in a steady sequence … well over a hundred yards clear of the balloon. The artillery—and especially the mortars—responsible for suppressive fire on 1st Company’s frontage took note, and the last of the explosive rounds whistled off, to be replaced solely by smoke.

* * *

“Heads up!” someone screamed out of the smoke. “Heads u—!”

The words disappeared, but the scream continued, a wordless shriek of pain as the heretic hand-bomb exploded. Hyrbyrt Ahdymsyn shoved his whistle into his mouth and blew it shrilly.

“Stand to!” he bellowed. “Stand to!”

* * *

Second Platoon swept forward with practiced lethality.

Each squad had broken down into three four-man teams, moving forward in the separate, coordinated, mutually supporting rushes which were the hallmark of Charisian small unit tactics. The first two teams in each squad consisted of three men with bayoneted pump shotguns and a dedicated grenadier, armed with a revolver and plenty of Mark 3 grenades, with the much more powerful Lywysite bursting charge. Each of his teammates carried a rucksack of additional grenades as well as his own ammunition. The third team in each squad had only two shotguns. The third man carried five satchel charges, each packed with just under twelve pounds of Lywysite … and the fourth carried an M97 flamethrower.

The M97—christened “Kau-yung’s fire striker” by the troops—consisted of two steel tanks, one containing fifteen gallons of fire vine oil and one filled with compressed air, connected to a steel wand forty-two inches long by a flexible hose. With a full fuel tank, it weighed just over a hundred and twenty pounds, which wasn’t an inconsiderable burden. To the men of the Glacierheart Brigade, however, it was worth every pound.

* * *

Lieutenant Ahdymsyn clutched his St. Kylmahn rifle as he fought to sort out the savage, smoky confusion. More shouts and screams cut through the bedlam, and he heard the flatter, duller sound of Church hand-bombs, clearly distinct from the sharp, ear shattering blast of the new heretic hand-bombs. He also heard rifle shots coming from his men … and an impossibly rapid “boom-boom-boom” in reply. Not even a heretic bolt action rifle could be fired that quickly, but something out there in the smoke was—

The heretics were no longer dropping as many smoke shells onto 2nd Company’s positions now that their own infantry was in contact, and the thinning smoke cleared for just a moment. In that window, Ahdymsyn could see for almost fifty yards, and his eyes widened as a belly-crawling heretic reached the sandbagged breastwork to his left and came up on one knee to shove the muzzle of a rifle that didn’t look quite right through the firing slit. He squeezed the trigger, and Ahdymsyn’s eyes widened in shock as he pulled the entire forestock of his rifle back, slid it forward once more, and fired again. And again!

The lieutenant’s belly was a frozen knot as the sheer speed of the heretic’s fire registered. But then another heretic rolled up beside the first one. His arm moved sharply, and both of them ducked back down to avoid the blast of one of their powerful hand-bombs as it blew back out the firing slit.

Even as the explosion roared, two more heretics, with the same bizarre-looking rifles, vaulted up and over the breastwork. They dropped into the trench behind it, and the earthen walls deadened the staccato booming of their weapons.

The heretic who’d thrown the grenade pushed up off his belly, and Ahdymsyn squeezed his trigger. The grenadier flew sideways, his head a bloody ruin, and Lynyrd Owyn fired at the dead grenadier’s squadmate. He hit the rifleman in the thigh, and the heretic rolled sideways and disappeared into one of the bombardment’s shell craters.

Ahdymsyn opened the breech on his St. Kylmahn, stuffed another round into the chamber, capped the lock, and brought the rifle back up as another quartet of heretics came out of the smoke, directly in front of him and less than twenty yards away. His and Lynyrd’s shots had marked their position for the heretics, and they were charging straight at him. He got the shot off and another heretic went down. Beside him, he was distantly aware of Sergeant Owyn raising his rifle while he began reloading his own with frantic haste, but somehow he knew there wouldn’t be time.

There wasn’t. The heretic behind the one he’d just wounded was carrying some sort of rod in his gloved hands. A bizarre, misshapen backpack swelled his silhouette grotesquely, and Ahdymsyn just had time to see the rod swinging in his direction.

The M97 flamethrower had a maximum range of fifty yards, twice the distance to Lieutenant Ahdymsyn firing slit, and the lieutenant’s world dissolved in shrieking agony as the river of fire roared through the opening to envelop him.