The Road to Hell

Chapter Forty-Three

April 14

It was very quiet inside the chansyu hut. The ticking of one of the Sharonian “clocks” would have been deafening, and Klayrman Toralk wondered what thoughts were running through Mayrkos Harshu’s brain. It was impossible to tell from the two thousand’s expression, but they had to be grim.

Fifty Jerstan’s frantic hummer message, sent from Fort Brithik, had reached the AEF three days ago. Jerstan himself had arrived with his personal report a day later, his transport dragon obviously exhausted from how hard his pilot had pushed. That arrival had dashed any lingering hope that the original message might have been born of panic and overreaction, because Jerstan had engaged the recording function in his helmet crystal and spent the better part of two hours circling the oncoming Sharonian column…from beyond its apparent artillery range, thus avoiding the fate of yet another overly aggressive young pilot. Commander of One Hundred Tamdaran had analyzed that imagery carefully, and his conclusion was the same as Toralk’s own analysts: there were at least five thousand Sharonians in that column, supplied with scores of artillery pieces.

Toralk had no more idea than anyone else how they could have gotten there. It was obvious they must have followed the Kelsayr chain, but nothing the AEF had seen on its advance to Fort Salby or learned in prisoner interrogations had suggested the Sharonians had the capability to move an entire brigade over seventeen thousand miles in barely four months! Nor did he understand how none of the pickets along that enormous approach route had managed to get off a single hummer message warning of the enemy’s coming.

Not that it really mattered, he supposed. No. What mattered was that the Sharonians wouldn’t have been stupid enough to send what looked like a single brigade of their dragoons so far into the Arcanans’ rear. The force which had annihilated Fort Brithik’s garrison less than one day after Jerstan had spotted it was a powerful formation, but it was also operating twenty thousand miles from the nearest major Sharonian base at Fort Salby, and its own communications would be vulnerable to air attack…assuming, of course, Toralk could find the battle dragons to attack them and get past Forth Brithik to reach them.

“Well,” Harshu said finally into the silence, “at least we know why they’ve been content to sit at the top of the Traisum Cut all these weeks, don’t we?”

His tone was almost whimsical, although his expression certainly wasn’t, and Toralk’s teeth ground together as he thought about the lost months while they’d waited here, confident they could savage any frontal attack. And it had seemed obvious such an attack had to be forthcoming, anyway. There was no other way the Sharonians could get at them, and their threadbare supply of recon gryphons had amply confirmed a steady, massive buildup around Fort Salby. The size of that buildup had made it abundantly clear that his staff’s initial estimates of Sharonian “railroads’” cargo-carrying capacity had been hopelessly inadequate. The enemy had taken longer to get his initial units into position than an Arcanan commander would have, but once those initial units had arrived to stabilize the front, Sharonian strength in Traisum had grown explosively. Coupled with their obvious preparations to assault down the Traisum Cut, there’d been no doubt that they’d read the unpromising menu of their tactical options the same way Harshu and Toralk had.

Yet as the size and power of the impending assault grew steadily and the reinforcements promised by Nith mul Gurthak equally steadily failed to materialize, Toralk had come to doubt the strategic wisdom of holding their position here. The sheer weight of the attack, whenever the Sharonians decided to unleash it, promised to be enormous, and if they did manage to carry the Cut, the AEF was likely to find itself in serious trouble, even with its maneuver advantages. The steady, annoying trickle of operational losses among Toralk’s transports had only increased his uneasiness, since each dragon in the dragon healers’ hands or sent to the rear to recuperate was one less dragon for troop movements if the Sharonians ever once broke free in Karys.

Yet as uneasy as Toralk had become, that very lack of transports had only underscored the importance of keeping the cork in the Traisum Cut. There, at least, the Sharonians were restricted to a single narrow avenue of attack through an all but impossible terrain obstacle. It was the only place the AEF could hold an attacking army as powerful as the one building up on the Fort Salby side of the portal. The only other option would have been to fall back, let the Sharonians in, and then operate as aggressively as possible against the enemy’s ground-bound supply columns. That would have been a purely delaying strategy, one which conceded the initiative entirely to the enemy, and the ugly truth was that there wasn’t a single spot between Traisum and Hell’s Gate itself that offered the defensive strength of the Traisum Cut.

“Do we have any better estimate of the enemy’s strength in Failcham, Sir?” Thousand Gahnyr asked. The AEF’s infantry commander’ was tight-faced and he couldn’t quite to keep an anxious edge out of his tone.

“Not really, Sir,” Five Hundred Mahrkrai answered for Harshu. The chief of staff met Gahnyr’s eyes levelly. “Our best estimate is still that this is a single Sharonian cavalry brigade with additional artillery attached. And, of course, those vehicles of theirs. I think we can take it for granted that there’s one hells of a lot more coming on behind them, though. The fact that they never let a single one of those big vehicles of theirs anywhere in range of our recon gryphons suggests they’ve been planning this all along. This isn’t some panicky, last-ditch ploy, so we can be damned sure they sent along a force they think is strong enough to look after itself in the face of anything we could throw at it.”

“Herak’s right,” Harshu said. “It’s obvious-now-” his smile was knife-thin and cold as a Lokan winter “that they’ve planned all along to mousetrap us here in Karys, and that means using a force strong enough to hold the portal against us.”

“In that case, Sir,” Gahnyr asked quietly, “what do we do?”

“A good question.” Harshu nodded. “Unfortunately, we don’t have a good answer for it, only a choice of bad answers. Not only are the Sharonians between us and home, but the speed of their communications is a hells of a lot faster than ours. Fort Brithik sent a hummer to Governor mul Gurthak at the same time they sent one to us, but it won’t reach him in Erthos until tomorrow. I’m sure as soon as it does he’ll pull out all the stops to get our reinforcements forward.”

His tone, Toralk reflected, indicated something less than rousing confidence in mul Gurthak’s doing anything of the sort.

“That’s not going to help us in the next couple of weeks, though,” the two thousand continued. “I’m afraid we have to assume the Sharonians’ arrival on the Karys portal indicates they’re about ready to pull the trigger on their counteroffensive from Traisum, too. I’m still confident we can hurt them badly if they come down the Cut into the teeth of our defenses, though, and they may not realize just how bloody we can make it for them. So the question is whether or not the force behind us is powerful enough to press an offensive into our rear. If it’s intended only as a blocking force-if it was meant to panic us into falling back without a battle or simply to hold the portal once their frontal attack drove us out of our positions-it’s unlikely to get too frisky any time in the immediate future. If that’s the case, we still have some time to work with, although getting supplies forward just got a lot more complicated.”

Now that, Toralk thought, was a generous understatement. Getting heavily laden transports past Sharonian artillery would be about as “complicated” as operations came.

“In the meantime, though, we need to plan for a rapid withdrawal,” Harshu went on unflinchingly. “I know it goes against the grain to give up all the ground between here and Thermyn, but I’m afraid we’re unlikely to have much choice. We do still have the advantage in tactical mobility. It took them four months to reach the Karys portal; we could’ve made the same movement in two weeks, assuming we could’ve gotten across the damned ocean in the first place. Not only that, we have to assume they moved as quickly as they could from the moment Fifty Jerstan sighted them to the moment they hit Fort Brithik, and that tells us that moving cross-country those vehicles of theirs can’t have a speed much greater than, say, twenty miles an hour. If we pull back from here, we’ll have to fight our way through the portal into Failcham, and that’s going to be ugly. The transports will have to make at least three trips to ferry all our people through the portal, and we’ll take losses every time they do it, but at least we won’t have to fight a rearguard all the way across Karys. Once we break contact here, we’ll have the speed to stay in front of any pursuit they could drive down the Cut even if we hadn’t seeded its walls with demolition spells to close it behind us.

“I’ve already sent hummers to Governor mul Gurthak telling him that if we’re forced to retreat from Karys I hope to fight a mobile campaign against any Sharonian forces in Failcham and Thermyn until a fresh offensive from Hell’s Gate can reach us. In the meantime-”

He paused, his eyes narrowing, as someone rapped very lightly on the office door and his eyes narrowed. Then the door opened and a message clerk stepped through it hesitantly.

“Yes?” The one-word question was sharper than usual, clearly irritated by the interruption, and the clerk came to attention and saluted.

“I’m sorry, Sir,” he said quickly, “but I thought you’d want to see this message as soon as possible.”

Harshu’s face smoothed into non-expression as the clerk’s tone registered and he held out his hand to accept the message crystal. He gazed down into it for two or three heartbeats, then his jaw tightened and he nodded to the clerk.

“You were right, Javelin,” he said. “Dismissed.”

The clerk disappeared, and the two thousand looked bleakly at his senior subordinates.

“It would appear our options are even more limited than I’d thought,” he said. “That was a hummer message from Five Hundred Klian in Mahritha. Apparently the brigade sitting on the Failcham-Karys portal wasn’t operating alone. Another brigade-or possibly an even stronger force-rolled over the Hell’s Gate picket two days before the hummer from Fort Brithik could reach them. Twelve hours later, they hit the Hell’s Gate-Mahritha portal in overwhelming force. The Thousand commanding the portal garrison had less than four hours’ warning before the attack rolled in, and according to Five Hundred Klian, he was probably outnumbered by at least three to one.”

Icy stillness hovered about him, and his nostrils flared.

“It would seem, Gentlemen,” the words came slow and measured, “that the Sharonians now control every portal between us and Mahritha.”