Empire from the Ashes

Chapter Thirty-Two

"All right, then. Everybody clear on his orders?"

Sean looked around the circle of faces in the late afternoon light. He and Tibold had spent weeks convincing their officers to ask questions whenever there was anything they didn't understand, but, one by one, each captain nodded soberly.

"Good!" He folded the map with deliberate briskness, then turned and gazed northeast to the screen of dragoons deployed across his line of advance. Beyond them, he could just see a village that was supposed to have been totally evacuated... and hadn't been.

Sandy's warning that there were still people about had come in time—he hoped. He'd sent flanking columns of dragoons forward, then had them curl back in from the east, and they seemed to have caught all the villagers before anyone got away to Malz.

It was the ninth day since he'd set out for Erastor. By his original estimate, he should already have been in striking distance of Ortak's rear; as it was, he was still south of the Mortan, the weather was going bad on him again, and the head of the Guard relief column should reach the Malz turn-off within four days. His time margin had become knife-thin, and if any of those peasants had fled with word of his presence, he was in a world of trouble.

Well, Sandy's stealthed spies would warn him if the bad guys did figure out he was coming. Which, unfortunately, wasn't going to help him a lot if they figured it out after he'd crossed the river and trapped himself between Ortak and High-Captain Terrahk's relief force.

He shook off his worry and nodded to his officers.

"Let's get this show on the road, then," he said, and they slapped their breastplates in salute and dashed off.

Considering the unexpected rigors of the swamp crossing, the men were in excellent shape, Sean thought. Tired, but far from exhausted, and their morale was better than he would have dared hope. They'd hated the swamps, but despite the delays, their confidence was unshaken. Which was good, because they had another ten kilometers to cover this day, and Malz was tied into the semaphore chain which connected Erastor to points east. Each semaphore station was a looming, gantry-like structure which let its crew see for kilometers in every direction and turned it into a watch tower. That meant the chain had to be cut in darkness, before any warning could be sent in either direction, and defined not only when Sean had to reach and secure Malz, but when he had to get his troops across the river to the Baricon-Erastor high road, as well.

He called for his own branahlk and trotted back towards his infantry. Part of him longed to go with the dragoons in person, but Sandy's stealthed cutter hovered above them. She'd tell him if anything went wrong, and he needed to be with his main body, ready to respond to any warning she might send.

He turned in the saddle to watch Captain Juahl lead the dragoons east. Juahl was a good man, he told himself, and he understood the plan. That was just going to have to be enough.

It was almost midnight, local time, when Sean's lead rifle regiments reached Malz. Bonfires encircled the town, and parties of dragoons picketed its unprepossessing walls. It wasn't a large town—no more than eight thousand even in normal times, and its population had declined drastically when the Holy Host came through en route to Yortown—but enough people remained inside those walls to stand off dragoons. Worse, there were plenty of potential messengers to warn Ortak what was happening, which was the reason for those pickets and bonfires.

A mounted messenger trotted up to him and saluted.

"Captain Juahl sent me to report, Lord Sean," the exhausted young officer said. "We haven't secured the Malz tower yet—they got the town gates shut and we didn't have the strength to force them—but Captain Juahl and Under-Captain Hahna secured the fords and both towers between here and the crossroads. Hahna's company is posted just east of the crossroads, and we got both towers intact. Captain Juahl said to tell you our men are ready to pass messages both ways, My Lord."

"Good!" Sean slapped the messenger's shoulder, and the young man grinned at him. "Are you up to riding back to Captain Juahl?"

"Yes, My Lord!"

"In that case go tell him I'm delighted with his news. Ask him to thank all of his officers and men for me, as well, and tell him I'll get infantry support up as fast as I can."

"Yes, My Lord!" The messenger saluted again and vanished into the darkness, and Sean turned to Tibold.

"Thank God for that!" he said softly, and the ex-Guardsman nodded. Most of the men who'd managed the Temple's semaphore chain across Malagor had fled the heresy, but enough had joined it to give Sean the personnel to man the towers he'd hoped to capture. Now he controlled High-Captain Ortak's mail... and the information flowing east to the oncoming relief column, as well.

"I want you to help handle the negotiations here," he went on after a moment, waving at the closed gates. "We haven't had any massacres yet, and I'd sooner not start now because someone makes a mistake." He tugged on his nose. "Let's send Folmak's brigade up to Juahl. He's level-headed enough to handle anything that comes at him unexpectedly. Make sure he's got a copy of our message notes, and tell him I'll join him in person as soon as possible."

"At once, Lord Sean." Tibold turned his branahlk and trotted off with a briskness Sean knew he didn't feel. Today's long march had been worse even than the swamp, and Tibold had spent part of it marching with each regiment. He insisted it was good for morale, and Sean believed him. It also meant "Lord Sean" had to stump along with the troops, too, but he was thirty-five years younger than Tibold and enhanced, to boot. He was undoubtedly the freshest man in the entire column, and all he wanted to do was sleep for a week.

Well, if Tibold could manage to look sharp and fresh, then so could Sean, and he'd damned well better do just that!

He grinned and dismounted, tossed his reins to one of his aides, and felt a spasm of pity for the townsfolk of Malz as he walked towards their closed gates. They had to know he could burn their town around their ears, and given the Inner Circle's propaganda, they probably expected him to do just that so their children would be nicely browned when he sat down to eat them! Convincing the poor bastards to open up was going to be a pain, but he needed to get it done before somebody did something stupid. Between them, Stomald and "the angels"—with a little help from the bloodthirsty field regulations of a certain Captain-General Lord Sean—had created a remarkably well-behaved army. The fact that it regarded itself as an elite force and confidently expected to kick the butt of a much larger army in a few days also helped by giving it a certain image to live up to, but Sean knew most of its restraint stemmed from the Holy Host's failure to reach Malagor. The Malagoran Temple Guard had done its share of village-burning on its abortive march to Cragsend, but half the men who'd done that were now members in good standing of the Angels' Army, and they'd done their very best to make amends. Yortown and the seizure of the Thirgan Gap had precluded the other atrocities religious wars routinely spawned, and the men felt little need for vengeance. Sean intended to keep it that way, but a handful of panicky townsmen who took it into their heads to "resist heresy" or simply thought they were defending their families could easily provoke a fire fight that might well expand into a full-blown massacre.

But that wasn't going to happen, he told himself firmly. He was a golden-tongued devil, and Tibold was going to advise him, and between them, they were going to talk those townsfolk into opening their gates without a shot being fired.

He stopped well out of aimed smoothbore range to wait for Tibold, and began to consider just how to accomplish that ambition.

"They've got Malz, and nobody got hurt on either side!" Harriet said as she entered the command tent, and her relief was so obvious Tamman refrained from observing that a lot of somebodies were going to get hurt at Erastor in a few days. Harry was too much like her dad and, appearance aside, not enough like her mom, he thought sadly.

"That's wonderful news," Stomald said, and Tamman nodded. It was wonderful news, too, he thought. At least Sean was finally out of those godawful swamps! None of them had expected him to lose that much time crossing them, and the entire operation was badly behind schedule, but it looked like they were going to make it after all... assuming the weather held.

"How are the fords?" he asked, gazing at the map and trying to hide a grin as Harriet stepped up beside Stomald and each of them tucked an arm around the other. So far they'd remembered not to do that in front of anyone but him or Sandy, and he didn't really want to find out how the troops would react if they slipped up and did it in public, but there was something incredibly touching about the shared tenderness in their eyes.

"Um?" Harriet looked up, then gave her head a shake. "Sorry, Tam. Sean says the fords are deeper than expected, but manageable if he takes it easy. The dragoons got across without losses, and the engineers are rigging guide ropes for the rest of the column. Tibold figures it'll take about five hours to get them all across once they start, but Sean's taking Folmak's brigade up to the crossroads tonight still. Well, this morning, I guess."

"So we've cut the semaphore chain, and it looks like no one knows we have," Tamman mused, plucking at his lip and gazing sightlessly at the map.

"Sandy and Brashan—" Harriet glanced at Stomald "—are monitoring their remotes in Erastor and tracking the relief column. So far, nobody in either place does know we're there."

"Yeah." Tamman nodded, then shrugged. "I know we've got them wired for sound, but I can't help worrying until we link back up with Sean." He studied the map a moment longer, then straightened. "I think I'll have a word with Ithun. If something does tip the bad guys, Ortak'll have to pull strength from our side of his position to do anything about it, and that might just let us slip an assault column through on him after all."

"Don't do anything rash without discussing it with Sean, Tam!"

"I won't get creative on you," he replied with a smile, "but Tibold's rubbing off on both of us. Like he says, 'Improvised responses work best when you've planned them well in advance!' "

" 'Bout time someone convinced you two of that," Harriet sniffed, and his smile turned into a broad grin.

"We're maturing, we are," he asserted virtuously. "And, ah, I'll see that no one disturbs you two while you 'confer,' too," he added wickedly as he opened the tent flap.

Sean looked up as Tibold's branahlk trotted up to the semaphore tower. The ex-Guardsman had gotten a whole three hours' sleep, and it was almost revolting how much that had restored him. He was soaked to the waist from fording the Mortan, but he waved cheerfully.

"The rearguard should be crossing just about now, Lord Sean," he said. "The lead brigade should arrive within the hour."

"Banners ready?" Sean asked.

"Aye, My Lord." Tibold grinned. The suggestion had come from Sandy, but he approved of it wholeheartedly. They'd captured more than enough Guard standards at Yortown to distribute among their regiments, and Sean had already sent Ortak a message from 'High-Captain Terrahk' to report he was further along than expected. With the banners for cover and the semaphore crews expecting to see Terrahk, any towers further up the chain that saw them coming should report them to Erastor as Ortak's expected relief.

Now Sean nodded to Tibold and turned back to the man who would command this semaphore garrison.

"Keep a sharp eye out, Yuthan," he said—for, he estimated, the sixth time, but Yuthan only nodded soberly. "You're doing an important job, but not important enough to risk getting cut off. If High-Captain Terrahk turns up, burn the tower and clear out."

"Aye, Lord Sean. Don't worry. None of us wants to get killed, My Lord, but we'll keep 'em confident until we do clear out."

"Good man." Sean squeezed the Malagoran's shoulder, then mounted his own branahlk and turned back to Tibold.

"I sent one of Folmak's regiments a little way west with a company of Juahl's dragoons, just to be on the safe side," he said, urging his mount to a trot. "They've got orders to stay out of sight from the next tower, but they're our front door. They've already hauled in about thirty people."

"That many?" Tibold was surprised. "I wouldn't have expected Ortak to allow that much traffic out of Erastor."

"Most of them seem to be trying to get as far from Erastor as they can," Sean snorted, "and I sort of doubt Ortak even knows they're doing it. Two-thirds of them are deserters, as a matter of fact."

"There are always some," Tibold said with a curled lip.

"I imagine there's even more temptation than usual if you believe you're up against demons. On the other hand, they might just think they could convince Ortak not to shoot them if they hustled back to tell him we're coming. Once the main body gets up here, have them sent back to Malz and kept there till Yuthan and his boys pull out. After that, they can do whatever they want."

"I don't envy them," Tibold said, almost against his will. "With Terrahk coming up the road, the best they can hope for is to take to the hills before he gets his hands on them."

"That's their problem, I'm happy to say," Sean grunted back. "I'll settle for making sure Terrahk doesn't get his hands on us."

High-Captain Ortak reread the message with enormous relief. Terrahk had set a new record for the march from Kelthar, the capital of Keldark, if he was already at Malz! He'd shaved another three days off his estimated arrival, and Ortak wondered how he'd done it. Not that he intended to complain. With those fifty thousand well-armed and (hopefully) unshaken men to reinforce it, Erastor would become impregnable. Better yet, Terrahk outranked him. Ortak could turn the responsibility over to him, and he was guiltily aware of how terribly he wanted to do just that.

"Any reply, Sir?" his aide asked, and Ortak leaned back in his chair, then shook his head.

"None. They're obviously already moving as fast as they can. Let's not make them think we're too nervous."

"No, My Lord," the aide agreed with a smile, and Ortak waved him out of the room and bent back to his paperwork. Three more days. All the heretics had to do was hold off for three more days, and their best chance to smash their way out of Malagor would be gone forever.

For all its self-inflicted technical wounds, Pardal was an ancient and surprisingly sophisticated world, Sean reflected, and its road network reflected it. He'd wondered, when they first spotted the Temple from orbit, how a preindustrial society could transport sufficient food for a city that size even with the canal network to help, but that was before he knew about nioharqs or how good their roads were. They'd developed some impressive engineers over the millennia, and most of them seemed to have spent their entire careers building either temples or roads. Even here in the mountains, the high road was over twenty meters wide, and its hard-paved smoothness rivaled any of Terra's pre-Imperial superhighways.

He drew up and watched his men march past. Like the Roman Empire, Pardalian states relied on infantry, and the excellence of their roads stemmed from the same need to move troops quickly. Of course, come to think of it, the same considerations had created the German autobahns and the United States interstate highway system, hadn't they? Some things never seemed to change.

Whatever their reasoning, he was profoundly grateful to the engineers who'd built this road. After their nightmare cross-country journey, the men moved out with a will, relieved to be out of the mud and muck, and they'd made over thirty kilometers today despite the hours spent crossing the Malz fords.

They'd also nabbed three more semaphore towers without raising any alarms. He was a bit surprised by how smoothly that part had gone, but Juahl had devised a system that seemed to work perfectly. He sent an officer and a couple of dozen men on ahead of the main body in captured Guard uniforms, and they simply rode straight up to each tower and asked the station commander to assemble his men. The semaphore crews belonged to the civil service, not the army. None of them were going to argue with Guard dragoons, and as soon as the Malagorans had them out in the open, they suddenly found themselves looking down the business ends of a dozen rifled joharns at very short range. Since the signal arms were controlled from the ground, it didn't even matter if the men manning the tower platforms realized what was happening. They couldn't tell anyone, and so far none of them had been inclined to argue when the rest of Juahl's men arrived and invited them to come down.

In the meantime, neither Ortak nor Terrahk seemed to harbor any suspicion an entire heretic army corps had nipped in between them. The towers Sean now controlled relayed all normal message traffic without alterations, but they were intercepting every dispatch either Guard officer sent the other. It was almost more delicious than what Sandy's and Brashan's stealthed remotes could tell him, for he was actually reading his enemies' mail, then dictating the responses he wanted them to receive. It looked like it was already having an effect, as well. Sandy reported that Terrahk had slowed his headlong pace just a bit thanks to the more confident tenor Sean had been giving Ortak's messages. But, of course, Ortak didn't know that, now did he?

Sean grinned wickedly, but then he looked up at the sky and his grin faded. The sun was sinking steadily in the west, and it was about time to bivouac, but what worried him was the growing humidity. Another front was coming through, and Brashan was still figuring out Pardal's weather patterns. The mountains made prediction even harder, and Sean suspected the front was moving faster than expected. But they should still have enough time, he told himself as he urged his branahlk back into motion. All he needed was two more of Pardal's twenty-nine-hour days.

"Two more days," Tamman murmured. He leaned back in a camp chair in his tent, eyes closed while his neural feed linked him to Israel and Sandy's remotes through the com in the stealthed cutter permanently parked in hover above "the Angel Harry's" commodious tent. He replayed the day's scan records at high speed and watched mentally as Sean's column sped up the high road towards Erastor. They were really moving, and they were still a good four days in front of High-Captain Terrahk. The way the relief column was easing up would open the gap a bit further, but sometime the day after tomorrow the Guardsmen were going to reach Malz and find out what had actually been happening.

They'd have no way to warn Ortak, and he wondered what Terrahk would do. Would he hustle on forward as fast as he could? If he knew how many men Sean had, the high-captain might figure he could take him in the open, but he'd be too far behind to overtake before Sean reached Erastor, and he'd know it. Just as he'd know that if Sean blew Ortak out of the way, his own column would be hopelessly inadequate to face the two hundred thousand screaming heretics the Temple now assumed the Angels' Army had.

It all came down to a guess, Tamman mused. Unlike Sean and himself, Terrahk was totally reliant on mounted scouts, and with the towers between him and Erastor in Malagoran hands, he'd have no way to know what was happening ahead of him. All he'd know was that if Ortak had somehow figured out what was coming at him and managed to throw up any sort of an east-facing defense, he'd need all the help Terrahk could send him to hold it. Or, conversely, that if Ortak had already been waxed, the only chance for his own troops' survival would be to run as hard as they could in the other direction.

Under the circumstances, Tamman suspected Terrahk would retreat. Abandoning Ortak might cost the Guard seventy or eighty thousand men, but if he lost his own command throwing good money after bad, the Temple would also lose its last field force. It was a pity Sean couldn't ambush Terrahk first and then take on Ortak, but too many things could go wrong, including the possibility that Sean would find himself trapped between enemies who outnumbered him by more than five to one. With room to maneuver and unlimited ammunition, odds like that might be workable; trapped between the Mortan and the valley's northern rim and with only the ammo his troops could carry, the situation would have all the ingredients for a MacIntyre's Last Stand.

Nope. The best outcome would probably be for Terrahk to keep coming and arrive a couple of days after he and Sean had crushed Ortak. If they could reunite their own army, they'd make mincemeat out of Terrahk—assuming they could catch him. At the very least, they should be able to stay close enough on his heels to keep him from settling into the prepared positions around Baricon. But Terrahk would know that as well as they did, which was why Tamman expected the Guardsman to fall back the instant he figured out what was happening.

He straightened and opened his eyes. One thing was certain, whatever Terrahk did, he reminded himself. Before he and Sean could get back into contact, they had to take Erastor, and he shoved up out of his chair. There was just enough light left for him and Ithun to make a last recon of Ortak's lines before darkness fell, and if it turned out that they had to storm those entrenchments to save Sean's posterior, he wanted all of his officers to know everything they could about their target.

More rain swept up the Keldark Valley, and High-Captain Ortak glared sourly at the clouds. The valley was always damp, of course. It was the only real opening in the Shalokar Range, and wet air from the east poured through it like a funnel as it swept up towards the Malagor Plateau. Some of the Temple's experts argued that as the air moved higher and grew thinner, the moisture fell out of its own weight. Ortak didn't fully understand the theory behind it, but all he really needed to know was that it rained in the valley—a lot—and that it was starting to do it again.

He growled a soft curse, then shrugged. Rain was his friend, not the heretics'. Their musketeers outnumbered his tremendously, and if God was kind enough to soak their priming powder for them, Ortak had no intention of complaining. Let them come in and take him on with cold steel!

"How long is this going to last?" Sean asked fretfully.

He and Sandy stood fifty meters from the nearest Malagoran and conferred over their coms with Brashan.

"At least another two days," the Narhani said soberly. He sat alone on Israel's command deck, and his long-snouted, saurian face was grave. "I am sorry, Sean. We thought—"

"Not your fault," Sean interrupted. "We all knew it was coming. We just expected it to hold off longer, and then we lost all that time in the swamps. Our window should have been big enough, Twinkle Hooves."

"True, but it's not only coming in faster, it's going to rain harder than we'd predicted." The Narhani sounded worried. Sean was less than one day's march from Erastor, and the rain—only a drizzle now—would be a downpour by evening. What that would do to flintlock rifles hardly bore thinking on.

"Can we hold off till it clears?" Sandy gazed up at Sean, and her voice was anxious.

" 'Fraid not." Sean sighed. "Ortak expects his 'reinforcements' by nightfall. If we suddenly stop moving, he's going to wonder why and send someone to find out. And if he does that—" He shrugged.

"But you can't fight him without your rifles!" Sandy protested. "You don't have any pikes at all!"

"No, but we do still have surprise."

"Surprise! Are you out of your mind?! There are eighty thousand men up there, Sean! There's no way you can take their position away from them before they figure out what's happening!"

"Maybe yes, and maybe no," Sean said stubbornly. "Don't forget the confusion factor. The rain's going to cut visibility. We should be able to get a lot closer before they figure out we aren't really Guardsmen, and there's a good chance they'll panic when their 'reinforcements' suddenly attack them. They don't have the kind of communication net a modern army would have, either. It's going to be mighty hard for them to get themselves sorted out when they have to rely on messengers to carry orders."

"You're crazy!" she hissed. "Tamman, Harry—tell him!"

"I think Sandy's right, Sean," Harriet said quietly. "It's too risky. Besides, even if he does figure out what's happening, Terrahk's already falling back on Baricon. Wait till the rain stops. Ortak's not going anywhere, and maybe he'll surrender when he realizes he's trapped between you and Tam."

"Wrong answer, Harry," Tamman put in unhappily. "Ortak's not the surrendering kind, or he wouldn't have stopped at Erastor."

"What else can he do?" Harriet demanded hotly.

"He can come out after us," Sean answered. "He knows as well as we do that it's our rifles that give us the edge. You think he wouldn't take his chances on hitting us in the open if the rain knocks them out of the equation?"

Sandy started to snap back, then stopped and bit her lip. She hugged herself and turned her back on Sean for a long, taut moment, then sighed.

"No," she said finally, her voice low. "That's exactly what he'll do if he figures out what's happening."

"You got it," Sean said, equally quietly, and kicked his toe into the mud beside the raised roadbed. "Any way you cut it, we've got to carry through with my marvelous plan."