By Heresies Distressed (31 page)

It was very quiet in Baron Dairwyn's library.

“The bombers were going to be attacking at night, under cover of darkness, to prevent the defending aircraft from spotting them and shooting them down short of their target. Navigating would be a problem, but they'd come up with a way to solve it for this particular attack. So there wasn't anything the British could do to stop it. It was
going
to happen.

“Under those circumstances, the question became whether or not the citizens of Coventry should be warned. Should Churchill order the evacuation of the city? Or should he simply see to it that the city authorities knew at least a few hours before the attack that it was coming so they could get their people—those
civilians
, including women and children—into the strongest, best protected bomb shelters they had?”

“What did he do?” Cayleb asked when Merlin paused.

“He didn't tell them at all,” Merlin said softly. Cayleb's eyes widened, and Merlin shook his head. “He couldn't tell them. If he'd warned them, if he'd tried to evacuate the city or to bolster its defenses before the attack, people would have wondered how he'd known. Questions would have been asked, and there were some very bright people working for the Nazis, as well as for the British. Rather as we're discovering is the case with Gahrvai, working for Hektor. If the Nazis had realized Churchill must have known in advance, they might have begun to wonder about the security of their codes. Were they as impossible to intercept and break as they'd thought they were?

“It was always possible, perhaps even probable, that they'd decide the British had figured it out some other way, through some sort of spy, perhaps. But they might not have. They might have wondered. And all they would have needed to do to nullify the intelligence advantage which had become one of Britain's most vital weapons would have been to change their cipher system ‘just in case.' Churchill decided he couldn't take that chance, and so he said nothing to Coventry, and the bombers flew over it, and they did enormous damage. Not as bad as the prewar pundits had predicted, but terrible enough.”

“And you're saying that if I warn Clareyk about what's coming, people may begin to wonder how I knew?”

“I'm saying that if you warn your field commanders too often, people
will
begin to wonder.” Merlin shook his head. “There's not a lot any of your enemies could do to prevent my SNARCs from spying on them even if they knew all about them. In that respect, your situation is very different from Churchill's. But if the fact that I have ‘visions' which guide your decisions gets out, you know what the Group of Four is going to say. You don't need—you can't
afford
—to give them a pretext for charging you with trafficking with demons. It's entirely possible charges of that sort are going to be levied against you before this is all over, anyway. But if they charge that
I'm
a demon, it will create all manner of problems. Not least because we can't possibly prove I'm not. For that matter, according to the doctrine of the Church of God Awaiting, I
am
one.”

Cayleb looked at him in silence for several seconds, then drew a deep breath.

“All right,” he said. “You're right. For that matter, I already knew everything you've just said. Not the part about ‘Churchill' or ‘bombers,' but the rest of it. It's just so
hard
, Merlin. I know men are going to be killed no matter what I do or how well I do it. However much I may not like that, I haven't had any choice but to accept it. But if I can keep
any
of them from being killed or maimed, I
need
to do it.”

“In the long term, that's exactly what you
are
doing, Cayleb. It's just that you're going to have to be very careful, very selective, about when and
how
you do it. And what you can do with it in a strategic sense, when it comes to planning and projecting operations, or what you can do by feeding ‘classified intelligence sources' to someone like Nahrmahn and letting him make the recommendations
I
can't make openly, is one thing. Using that same information for something like this is something else entirely.”

Cayleb nodded unhappily. Then he looked back down at the table, eyes distant while he obviously imagined the men represented by the tokens on the map. He stayed that way for several seconds, then straightened his shoulders and looked back up at Merlin.

“What about this?” he asked. “Suppose I send a message forward to Clareyk, who's already worked with you and me both and probably knows a lot more about your ‘visions' than he's ever let on? I won't tell him what Gahrvai and his commanders are discussing, or what they had for dinner. I'll just tell him I have a ‘feeling' our reconnaissance reports have been less than complete. That shouldn't be particularly surprising, when we've got so little cavalry and everyone knows the horses we do have are still trying to regain their land legs. I won't pull him back, since there's no concrete evidence to support my ‘feeling.' Instead, I'll simply instruct him to be particularly alert in the next couple of days and to operate on the assumption that the enemy may be much closer to him, and in considerably more strength, than our scouts' reports so far have indicated.”

Merlin considered it for a moment, then nodded.

“I think that's unlikely to create any problems,” he said. “Especially not if you don't include any specific numbers. ‘In considerably more strength' is a good, cautionary phrase which shouldn't suggest any definite knowledge we shouldn't have. And I don't suppose it will hurt a bit for the troops to decide that that ‘seaman's instinct' of yours translates into land battles, as well.”

“I'd still prefer to pull them back,” Cayleb said, looking back at the map. “Even if Clareyk and Haimyn take any warnings from me fully to heart, it won't change the numbers against them. And even if you see Gahrvai doing something else—throwing out a cavalry force to cut their line of retreat, for example—there won't be anything we can do about it. We probably couldn't get word to them quickly enough for it to do any good even if we didn't have to worry about people's wondering how we'd ‘guessed' what was coming.”

“That's going to become something we have to live with more and more often, I'm afraid,” Merlin said. “And to be perfectly honest, the times when we can use my ‘visions' are only going to make the times when we
can't
use them hurt even more. But like everything else, there are limits to this, as well. We're simply going to have to accept them.”

“I know.” Cayleb smiled crookedly. “I suppose it's just human nature to always want more. You're already the greatest unfair advantage any commander's ever had. I suppose it's churlish of me to want an even bigger unfair advantage, but there it is. I guess I'm just naturally greedy.”

“There was a saying back on Old Earth,” Merlin told him. “I don't approve of it for many things in life, but I think it's applicable to military operations.”

“What sort of saying?”

“ ‘If you're not cheating, you aren't trying hard enough,' ” Merlin said. Cayleb's mouth twitched and the somberness in his eyes was lightened by a flicker of amusement, and Merlin shook his head. “Your father understood that the object in a war wasn't to see who could ‘fight fairest.' Mind you, he was one of the most honorable men I ever knew, but he recognized that a commander's greatest responsibility is to his own troops. To keep as many of them alive as possible, and to do his very best to ensure that those who die anyway die for a
purpose
. That their deaths aren't wasted. And that means not asking them to take stupid chances in the name of ‘honor.' It means figuring out the best way you can shoot their enemies in the back. It means taking every advantage you can find, buy, steal, or invent and using it to keep your people alive and, as another person from Churchill's war put it, make the other poor dumb son-of-a-bitch die for
his
country.”

“That isn't a very chivalrous concept of war,” Cayleb observed.

“I'm not a very chivalrous sort, in that respect, at least,” Merlin replied. “And neither is any king—or emperor—worthy of his people's loyalty.”

“Then I suppose it's a good thing I'm a naturally sneaky sort of fellow. I mean, I'd hate to disappoint you or make you go looking for someone else who's sufficiently underhanded, devious, cunning, and unscrupulous to suit your nefarious purposes.”

“Oh, I wouldn't worry about that,” Merlin said with a broad smile. “Given your little explanation about what you have in store for Grand Duke Zebediah, I really don't think I
could
find anyone who was more underhanded, devious, cunning, and unscrupulous than you are.”

“Gosh, thanks.” Cayleb grinned, then gave himself a shake. “And now that we've got that settled, let's get a signalman in here to get my ‘I've got a bad feeling' message off to Clareyk.”

Brigadier Kynt Clareyk contemplated the dispatch in his hand, then looked down at the map spread out before him. Despite the Archangel Hastings' world-spanning atlas, the map in front of Clareyk was far less detailed than he could have preferred. Mostly that was simply a matter of the scale at which he was operating, but the fact that the Archangel's original maps were eight hundred years out of date, and that mere mortals had been responsible for updating them in the meantime, didn't help. In fact, it didn't help a bit.

His own limited handful of cavalry, his scout-sniper teams, and his attached engineering section had added a good bit of cartographic detail, but, unfortunately, mostly it was detail about places they'd already been.

“What do you make of it, Kynt?” Mahrys Haimyn asked quietly.

“ ‘Make of it'?” Clareyk repeated, glancing up at his fellow brigadier. Haimyn looked at him for a moment, then smiled slightly.

“Don't give me that innocent look,” he said. “You and I both know you spent the better part of a year working directly with His Majesty and
Seijin
Merlin. Did you really think I wouldn't figure out that His Majesty's little note says more to you than just the words he actually wrote down?”

“I don't have any idea what you're talking about.” Clareyk's innocent tone wasn't very convincing. Then again, he hadn't intended for it to be.

“Of course not. Now, to repeat my earlier question. What do you make of it?”

“I think,” Clareyk said, speaking slowly, his expression far more serious than it had been, “that we're about to walk into a shit storm.”

“That's funny. That's what I thought it might mean, too.”

“Yes. Well, somehow I doubt the Emperor would have sent us a personal message like this one if he wasn't pretty sure his ‘hunch' was accurate.”

“You mean
Seijin
Merlin's hunch, don't you?” Haimyn asked quietly.

The look Clareyk gave him this time was far sharper, and the other brigadier snorted.

“Forget I asked that.” Haimyn shook his head. “It's not really any of my business, I suppose. But, just between the two of us, you might want to mention to the Emperor that I'm not the only one who's noticed how many new things started happening right about the time the
seijin
turned up in Charis.”

“Oh?”

“
I'm
not complaining!” Haimyn assured him. “In fact, I think it was a damned good thing he did turn up. I just thought you might want to let His Majesty know.”

“Contrary to what you may believe, Mahrys,” Clareyk said mildly, “I really don't spend all of my free time hobnobbing with the Emperor. Or with
Seijin
Merlin, for that matter.”

“Of course not,” Haimyn agreed politely. Then he twitched his head at the dispatch still in Clareyk's hand. “And in the meantime?”

“In the meantime, we figure out what we plan on doing if we should happen to run into any unfriendly souls.”

“That suits me right down to the ground. And, to be honest, I'd really like to find better ground than this.” Haimyn waved his hand at the tangled trees and dense underbrush which surrounded them. “I know this is good defensive terrain, but from a rifleman's perspective, it sucks.”

Clareyk chuckled sourly at the junior brigadier's succinct description. Which, he conceded, summed up his own opinion quite handily.

At the moment, they stood in a clearing which was little more than a wide spot in what passed for the royal “highway” between Dairos and Manchyr. To be fair, it was probably entirely adequate for the traffic which normally passed along it, but that traffic didn't include armies. Fatigue parties were busy widening the roadway by cutting back the encroaching tree cover and undergrowth and filling in the worst ravines and gullies, but they were far behind Clareyk's and Haimyn's brigades. Fortunately, the two brigadiers had barely four thousand men between them, so the less than marvelous state of the road was nowhere near as big a problem for them as it might have been for General Chermyn's main body.
Un
fortunately, they had barely four thousand men between them, so if they ran into sizable numbers of Corisandians, they might just find themselves short on firepower.

And if we wind up having to retreat under fire, the fact that we only have one main road is
not
going to be a good thing
, he reflected.

“All right,” he said finally. “According to this,” he tapped the map, “there's a large village or a small town another few hours' march up the road. It looks like there's a good-sized monastery or priory of some sort southwest of the town, too. I'd think that if people actually live out here, they must have cleared farmland, wouldn't you?”