Lieutenant Charlz Dahnsyn, the colonel’s senior aide, was an intelligent young man. As such, he kept his mouth firmly closed.
“I’m not going to bite you, Charlz,” Wyllys half growled. “Mind you, I’d like to take a chunk out of somebody, and not just because I could use the meat.”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Oh, relax.” Wyllys shook his head. “We knew it was only a matter of time. And at least the snow’s melted. Besides, this is a splendid opportunity to see if Captain Klairynce’s brilliant inspiration has a hope in Shan-wei of actually working. Not that I doubt its success for a single moment, you understand.”
“Yes, Sir.” Dahnsyn’s tone and expression were considerably more relaxed this time, and Wyllys smiled sourly before he bent back over the map on the slightly charred kitchen table which had been hauled from some farmhouse’s ruins to his command post.
The Sylmahn Gap stretched well over two hundred and fifty miles from north to south, as if some archangel’s battleaxe had cloven the deep, narrow gash between the Snow Barrens and the Moon Thorns. For most of its length, it was little more than twenty or thirty miles wide, and it narrowed to considerably less than half that in places. The widest portion—its northwestern end, where it broke free of the mountains into the high, fertile tableland of western Mountaincross at the city of Malkyr—was almost a hundred miles wide, but that width was badly constricted by the deep, cold waters of Lake Wyvern.
The Gap’s floor descended steadily as it made its way south, and the Guarnak-Sylmahn Canal ran right down its center. That canal connected the uppermost navigable reaches of the Sylmahn River to the Hildermoss River, six hundred and fifty miles to the northwest as a wyvern flew, and, via the Guarnak–Ice Ash Canal, to the Ice Ash River five hundred and thirty miles to the northeast. To the south, the Sylmahn connected to the Tairmana and Siddar City Canals, giving direct access to the capital, seven hundred and twenty miles to the southeast.
The next best thing to a hundred and fifty feet across and twenty-five feet deep, with tow roads for the hill dragons who, in more peaceful days, pulled barges along it, the canal was a formidable obstacle. The high road from Guarnak all the way to Siddar City ran down the west side of the canal, raised almost twenty feet above water level, on the far side of the forty-foot wide bed of the northbound tow road. The southbound tow road ran down the canal’s eastern side, making the canal’s entire cut the next best thing to a hundred yards across, and there was less clearance between the canal and the steep slopes of the Moon Thorns than to the west. Below Jairth, there wasn’t much room on either side, since the entire Gap narrowed to no more than thirteen miles at that point. Thirteen miles was still a lot of ground to cover with only his own regiment, though, especially after the casualties the 37th had taken over the winter.
Still, he reminded himself, it’s not like there isn’t some good news to go along with the bad. In fact, I’m sure Zhaksyn is pointing that out to Styvynsyn about now.
He smiled with genuine humor at the thought, because he hadn’t picked his lead company at random. Young Styvynsyn was a solid, steady commander, and Grovair Zhaksyn had served in the Republic’s army longer than Styvynsyn had been alive. He wasn’t especially worried about the 2nd getting overly frisky, and if things worked out the way they were supposed to, he’d have Ghavyn Sahlys’ 5th Company to help keep a lid on things.
Of course, that assumes the other fellow doesn’t have plans of his own you happen not to have thought of, Stahn, he reminded himself.
He ran his finger along the line of the high road. As the Writ stipulated, it was sixty feet across, with a fifteen-foot shoulder to either side, and raised above the surrounding terrain, with its hard, well-paved surface sloped to promote good drainage. Here in the mountains, the built-up roadbed was pierced at regular intervals by large, sturdy culverts to further promote drainage, especially where it crossed the upper Sylmahn’s channel. The river was completely unnavigable, little more than a shallow, rapidly flowing creek, once it got above Serabor—that was why the canal ran into the artificial basin at the Serabor Locks—but it ran high, deep, and fast in the spring, filled with brown water and foam. By now, it was fretting and fuming as it backed up, spreading out as it overflowed its usual channels to send the extra water from all that melting snow through additional culverts. That happened every year, but this year at least half those culverts had been blocked with rubble and debris—some accidentally; more of them because he’d ordered his men to do exactly that as they retreated from Terykyr. There’d been some protests about that, at least until Father Ahlun, General Stohnar’s chaplain, had pointed out in his sermons that the rebels had begun sabotaging the canals and high roads, despite the Writ’s prohibitions, on the direct authority of the Grand Inquisitor’s own order. That hadn’t completely ended the unhappiness, but it had stilled the protests.
Now the water between the Snow Barrens and the high road was spreading fast, turning the entire area into a treacherous sea of mud and swamp covered by anything from several inches to as much as ten or fifteen feet of extremely cold water. Given the number of stone walls, rail fences, barns, and farmhouses—not to mention gullies, granaries, wells, and a burned-out village or two—submerged in that water, wading through it would be as exhausting and dangerous as it was chilling. And if the roadway’s canal side was still relatively clear for now, that wasn’t going to last, either.
Normally, the Faithful’s possession of the high ground around Terykyr would have allowed them to control the water level in the canal by closing the locks there. With the snowmelt beginning to pour down off the mountains, though, water was in copious supply, and the level in the canal’s cut was already far above its banks. If things worked out as General Stohnar had planned, that was only going to become even more pronounced over the next several five-days, too. The Serabor Locks were too low to produce that effect by themselves, but the dam the engineers and civilian volunteers had built was considerably higher. Now water was backing steadily up in the cut, beginning to spill across the tow roads. Very shortly, only the high road itself would remain above water, like a causeway surrounded by ruin.
And neither side’s going to get more than a single company down the high road at a time, he thought grimly. That favors us, since all we really want at the moment is to keep them from coming any farther south. But I’d really prefer to do that without gutting Styvynsyn’s company. And I don’t think the General’s going to complain if we manage to kill off a few hundred more of the treasonous bastards along the way.
Actually, he knew, although General Trumyn Stohnar would have preferred to be considerably farther north than he was at the moment, they were lucky to be here at all. The Sylmahn Gap had been high on the list of the “Sword of Schueler’s” initial operations in Mountaincross, and the rebels had flooded down it in overwhelming numbers during the early days of the uprising. Indeed, they’d driven the militia who’d tried to hold it all the way back to Serabor before the battered defenders managed to stop them. Most of the deep, narrow valley had been turned into wreckage and ruin in the process, and Serabor itself was little more than a charred and churned wasteland.
At one point, Serabor had been under attack from the east as well as the west, and the rebels had thrown incendiaries into the town during the month-long siege it had endured before Stohnar’s column cut its way through to the defenders. Most of its wooden structures had burned before his arrival, and the majority of its stone houses and warehouses had been pulled apart by the defenders themselves. Unlike some realms, the Republic possessed few walled cities or fortified towns east of the border marches. It was the army’s job to make sure they didn’t need fortifications, and Serabor had been no exception to that unfortified norm. The desperately outnumbered militiamen, who’d joined the two badly understrength companies of regulars to hold it, had been forced to throw together whatever fieldworks they could.
The rebels had been at the end of their own tether when General Stohnar ca
me on the scene, however. Half-frozen and half-starved, outnumbered by the relatively fresh, well-trained, and enraged regulars the lord protector had sent, and faced for the first time with rifles (if only in small numbers), the attackers from over-mountain had been driven in a rabble for over a hundred and seventy miles before they’d managed to dig in in turn and hold at Malkyr. But then it had been their turn to reinforce heavily, and Stohnar—short on supplies and with little hope of additional reinforcements of his own—had been driven one bloody step at a time back down the long, weary way his men had come. Now his front lay little more than halfway between the wreckage of Serabor and the ruins of Jairth, and he couldn’t afford to be driven any farther south.
Well, the colonel thought now, you knew the lull was too good to last, Stahn. They may be traitors and they may be butchers, but that doesn’t necessarily make them blind, drooling idiots. They have to know we’re going to turn the entire Gap into one huge swamp if they can’t break through and destroy the dam, and at least they gave you almost two full five-days to catch your breath before they decided to do something about that. I guess it’s time to see whether or not all that scheming you did while you were resting is going to do you any good in the end.
He hoped it would. Not that he was looking forward to it, whatever Father Ahlun might have to say, but if they weren’t going to be able to hold the high road.…
“Get a courier to Major Sahlys,” he told Dahnsyn without looking up from the map. “I know he’s already in position, but pass him Styvynsyn’s message and tell him I expect first contact between the rebels and the Second in the next hour and a half.”
“Yes, Sir!”
The lieutenant slapped his breastplate and disappeared in a rapid squelching of mud, and Wyllys smiled grimly.
I can’t get more than one company onto the road at a time, he thought in the direction of the oncoming rebels. But neither can you bastards, and you know the terrain a lot better than I do, so I’m not going to manage any surprise attacks, now am I? Of course I’m not! So you just keep on coming.
His smile turned into something very much like a slash lizard’s snarl, and his right index finger tapped the map. It was probably a good thing he’d shared his plans with General Stohnar ahead of time, he reflected, although, to be honest, the idea itself had come from Lieutenant Hainree Klairynce, 3rd Company’s acting commander. Klairynce was the youngest of his company COs. Indeed, legally he was too young to command a company at all, even one as understrength as the 3rd. But he was as smart as he was young, and he’d been born and raised in Glacierheart. He knew mountains, he had plenty of initiative, he figured anything Clyntahn had authorized could be used against him, and his family had been coal miners and canal workers for generations.
And that, my fine Temple Loyalist friends, is going to be a very bad thing indeed from your perspective, Wyllys thought coldly. After all, you’re the ones trying to fight your way out of the Gap. All I have to do is keep you penned up inside it until the Lord Protector can reinforce us, and I intend to do just that.
.V.
Jairth, Sylmahn Gap, Mountaincross Province, Republic of Siddarmark
Hahlys Cahrtair’s horse’s hooves clattered on the high road’s stony surface and his face was grim as he followed 2nd Platoon. At least one in ten of his pikemen was barefoot, without even boots, although Father Shainsail and Colonel Baikyr promised new boots would be forthcoming from Guarnak any day now. Personally, Cahrtair would believe that when he actually saw them.
At least the weather’s turned, he reminded himself harshly. We’re not still losing the boys to frostbite. Not that we haven’t lost more than enough of them already.
The Siddarmarkian army had long been noted for its quartermaster’s efficiency, but that had been before it was two-thirds destroyed in the Rising. Both sides had burned or destroyed the army’s peacetime network of provincial magazines in order to keep them from falling into the other side’s hands. That had inevitably increased civilian suffering, since those magazines had also been intended to feed civilians in times of disaster, and the devastation of the Republic’s transportation system, especially the sabotage of so many canal locks, had turned a dire situation into catastrophe. Indeed, the chaos as vast numbers of refugees struggled through snow and ice, seeking some sort of security, amply demonstrated the reasons for Langhorne’s charge to protect the canals on which so much depended. The fact that the Grand Inquisitor had been forced to suspend that rule, despite the consequences for so many civilians, had been equally ample proof of God’s decision to punish Siddarmark for its leaders’ sins, nor had that been the only scourge laid across the Republic’s bleeding back.
The starving, ill-equipped troops in the field had been unable to comply fully with Pasquale’s Law, and the inevitable upsurge of disease had cost the Faithful many more casualties than they’d suffered in battle. Unless Cahrtair missed his guess, they weren’t done yet, either. His own company—made back up for this attack to something which actually approached its assigned strength with drafts from the reinforcements which had arrived three five-days ago—had lost over half its original strength. Most of those men were dead, and over fifty of those who hadn’t died—yet—were too sick to march. And with their privation-weakened resistance, at least half of them would die in the end, even if fresh food miraculously arrived tomorrow. That was simply the way it was, and there wasn’t one damned thing he could do about it.
And if those heretic bastards manage to flood the lower Gap completely, we’ll be frigging well stuck here in the middle of a goddamned swamp until next autumn. Pasquale only knows what kind of sickness levels we’ll be looking at then!
Hahlys Cahrtair didn’t know, and he didn’t want to find out, which was why he intended to push as far south as he possibly could, whatever Maiksyn might have to say.
He’s not as much of an old woman as I thought he was before the Rising, the major admitted grudgingly. Not quite. And I’d just as soon have some support handy when I run into the bastards, for that matter. But the high road runs too close to the west side of the Gap at Jairth. If the heretics get their damned riflemen up on our flank, especially with a couple of hundred yards of water between us and them, we’ll play hell pushing farther down the road later.
The truth was that those riflemen had proved far more effective than anyone had anticipated. Indeed, they’d played a major role in breaking the Faithful’s morale when Stohnar’s attack drove them back from Serabor. Not because they’d killed all that many people; there hadn’t been enough of them for that. No, it was the range at which they’d been able to kill. Nobody on the Temple Loyalist side—not even Colonel Baikyr and his regulars—had ever actually experienced rifle fire. They’d expected it to be more effective than matchlocks, but they’d never counted on a weapon that could hit specific man-sized targets at three hundred yards! It was only through the grace of Langhorne and Chihiro the heretics had so few of them, but those few had been more than enough to give Cahrtair and his men a profound respect for their capabilities. Indeed, in his opinion, Maiksyn had yet to fully appreciate the range at which rifle fire could dominate exposed terrain, and he was only glad Stohnar didn’t have any artillery.
Yet. That we know of, anyway, he corrected himself. Of course, we don’t either, do we?
That, too, was something they were promised, along with rifles of their own, but they hadn’t seen either yet. And the unhappy truth was that it was going to take a lot of both to beat the damned heretics in the end. At the moment, though, the new weapons were still too thin on the ground, even among the heretics, to be decisive, and that meant the campaign for the Gap all came down to a race. In a head-on confrontation, a well-prepared defender always had the advantage, and in the confines of the Sylmahn Gap, the only attacks possible were going to be frontal. No one was going to manage to get men armed with eighteen-foot pikes through the lizard paths that snaked through the mountains above it, at any rate! The heretics clearly understood that as
well as Cahrtair did, and their efforts to flood the valley until only the high road itself stood above water would make that even worse.
Langhorne only knows how many thousands of men we’ve already lost. But if we don’t break through the Gap before the heretics dig in and build a frigging fortress all the way across it, we’ll never get through at all, and all the men we’ve already lost will’ve died for nothing, Cahrtair reflected with cold, harsh pragmatism. We have to drive through now, even if it costs another regiment or two. Father Shainsail understands that, and if he’s behind me, I’ll take my chances with Maiksyn and Baikyr.
* * *
“I think it’s time to open the dance,” Major Styvynsyn said, watching the column of rebel infantry march steadily down the high road towards him.
He and Sergeant Zhaksyn stood on the crest of a little hill, no more than a dozen feet high. It said a great deal about the flatness of the Sylmahn Gap’s floor that such a small terrain feature could be considered a “hill” at all, and it would have offered very little in the way of concealment or tactical advantage if the rebels had scouted the towering slopes to either side properly. From such elevated perches, they would have been able to see for miles along the Gap, and they’d easily have spotted anything Styvynsyn had hidden behind the hill.
The rebels weren’t doing that kind of scouting, though, the major reflected grimly. Even the relatively small number of rifles General Stohnar had brought with him were enough to allow his troops to dominate the narrow paths which snaked through the mountains to either side of the Gap. In this instance, though, they weren’t sending patrols very far out in front even down here on the valley floor, and he wondered whether that was caution—they’d lost a lot of scouts to ambushes—or arrogance.
Not that it mattered at this point, since Styvynsyn had precious little to hide … and absolutely no intention of holding his position. On the other hand, a little uncertainty on an adversary’s part never hurt.