By Heresies Distressed (48 page)

And I suppose, if I'm going to be honest, I did have a need to see the front line with my own two eyes. Just to be sure the damned thing was where I left it last night
.

He snorted at the thought, then glanced up at the sky. One of the storm season's tropical storms was moving in on Corisande from the east, across the Great Western Ocean. To Gahrvai's experienced eye, it was obvious that plenty of rain and high winds were about to sweep in across Dairwyn and the Earldom of Coris yet again. It would be the second storm since he'd dug in here, which meant he had a pretty fair idea of what was going to happen when it hit. It was going to be thoroughly unpleasant here in the pass when the water began flooding his earthworks and trenches, but it wasn't going to be any picnic for the Charisians, either. And it should at least keep the damned marksmen off the slopes for a day or two.

And the longer Cayleb will let us sit here, the better. It may be hard work keeping the men fed, but it's the best damned defensive position this side of Manchyr. And Cayleb is about to get a surprise of his own if Father's last semaphore message is accurate
.

The Charisians' rifles had come as a nasty—one might as well be honest and say “terrifying”—surprise to Gahrvai and his army. They'd come as an equally unpleasant surprise, if at secondhand, to Earl Anvil Rock. No one had been able to imagine how the Charisians had managed to equip every single one of their Marines with a rifle which actually fired
faster
than most smoothbore muskets.

Not until one of Gahrvai's surgeons recovered a half-dozen bullets from the bodies of his wounded men.

The bullets had been badly deformed from their mangling passage through human flesh and bone, but they'd been sufficiently intact for Gahrvai to realize what he was looking at. It was another of those damnably simple “innovations” Charisians seemed so fond of. He'd been sure there were aspects of it which had required experimentation on the Charisians' part, but the underlying principle was absurdly easy to grasp. Instead of hammering an oversized bullet down the bore, which was the way everyone
else
forced it to take the rifling, the Charisians had simply designed a hollow-based, conical bullet. When the powder detonated, the force of the explosion spread the base of the bullet, forcing it into the rifling and sealing the bore behind it, and the bullet's stretched shape meant it was heavier than a spherical ball of the same diameter. It was probably also a better shape for driving through the air, although Gahrvai wasn't certain about that.
And
the fact that, before the base expanded on its way to its target it was actually a looser fit in the barrel than a regular musket's round ball made it faster to load one of the new rifles than it was to load even one of his own men's smoothbore muskets.

The critical point was that once the surgeon had realized what he was looking at and drawn it to Gahrvai's attention, Earl Anvil Rock and his artisans had assigned the highest possible priority to figuring out exactly how the Charisians had made the design work . . . and how to duplicate it. According to his father's last message, they seemed to have done just that. There was no way they would have time to manufacture anything like the numbers of rifled muskets the Charisians had, but his father was scraping up every single sporting rifle he could find and turning out new bullet molds for them. Gahrvai would be surprised if there were more than a couple of hundred rifles in the entire Duchy of Manchyr. They were expensive toys, which only wealthy hunters could afford, and the fact that they came in such a wide diversity of calibers meant each of them would require its own specifically designed bullet mold. But even fifty of them in the hands of trained marksmen of his own would be a nasty surprise for the Charisians who were steadily pecking away at his men.

And if Cayleb will just give me another month, say—just to the end of the storm season, for example—then Father
will
be able to start putting worthwhile numbers of rifled muskets into production. We still won't have anything like the same total numbers, but we'll have enough to . . . convince Cayleb to approach us more cautiously than he did at Haryl's Crossing. And if it should happen that the next time we fight an open field battle I've got a few hundred, or a couple of thousand, rifled muskets of my own and he doesn't
know
it
. . .

Sir Koryn Gahrvai knew he was indulging in wishful thinking. Still, it could work out that way. And for now, at least, he had a cork firmly in the bottle of Talbor Pass, and he had no intention of pulling it back out again.

“—still say we ought to go ahead and hammer him, Your Majesty.” It was hard to imagine a
respectful
growl of disgust, but Hauwyl Chermyn managed to pull it off. Cayleb's senior Marine stood on the far side of the map table, glowering down at the broken-backed snake of Talbor Pass, and from his expression, he would have liked to personally throttle Sir Koryn Gahrvai with his own large, sinewy hands.

“That's only because you're constitutionally opposed to doing nothing, Hauwyl,” the emperor said mildly. The general looked up at him and had the grace to blush, and Cayleb chuckled. That chuckle was not a sound of unalloyed amusement.

“Trust me,” he said. “I'm not incredibly in love with the idea of sitting on our hands, either. But in your saner moments, you know as well as I do that hammering straight into the positions Gahrvai's managed to build for his troops is going to produce nothing but a bloodbath, rifles or no rifles. And not, unfortunately, a
Corisandian
bloodbath.”

Chermyn looked very much as if he would have liked to disagree, but he couldn't, and so he nodded unhappily, instead.

“You're right, of course, Your Majesty. I just hate the thought of
sitting
here. We've got virtually the entire Marine Corps camped out here, and we haven't done a thing since Haryl's Crossing. We're giving them
time
, Your Majesty, and we're wasting time of our own.”

“Granted.” Cayleb didn't even glance at the tall, sapphire-eyed guardsman standing behind him. “The problem is that we don't have enough mobility on land to slip around Gahrvai. If we had more troops than he does, we could try stretching out our right flank, forcing him to garrison other passes until he thinned out Talbor enough for us to punch through it. Unfortunately,
he
has more men than
we
do. And he also has a lot more—and a lot better—cavalry than we do. Charisians are seamen, not horsemen. You might want to get Admiral Lock Island's view on the proper degree of familiarity between sailors' arses and saddles. Believe me, he doesn't think they should spend any more time in contact with one another than they can possibly avoid. And that, unfortunately in this instance, pretty well sums up the Navy's attitude in general.”

“All of that's true, Your Majesty, but—”

“We knew it was going to be like this,” Cayleb pointed out. “Oh, I don't believe any of us thought it would be quite
this
bad, but we recognized from the beginning that we were going to face a problem rather like this one. So, while I fully understand why you're feeling so impatient, I think we'll stick to our original strategy.”

If he'd been speaking to anyone else, Chermyn would have puffed his mustache at Cayleb. Since he happened to be speaking not simply to his superior officer, but to his emperor and commander-in-chief, he didn't. And in all fairness to the Marine, Cayleb knew Chermyn understood exactly what he was saying. After all, the general had helped build their original strategy in the first place.

“You're right, of course, Your Majesty,” Chermyn said after a moment. “It just goes against the grain to sit here, doing nothing.”

“As it happens, General, ‘nothing' is exactly what we
aren't
doing,” Cayleb said with a nasty smile. Chermyn's eyes narrowed, and the emperor chuckled again. This time it was a much more pleased sound.

“The longer he's prepared to sit there, the better I like it, Hauwyl,” Cayleb told him. “I'm still pushing the thought around in my brain, but believe me, if we can convince him to give me another month or so to work with, he'll really, really wish he hadn't.”

“I'll take your word for that, Your Majesty,” Chermyn said with simple sincerity, then bowed and withdrew from the room. The door closed behind him, and Cayleb turned to Merlin.

“That,” he remarked, “is an impatient man.”

“Not so much impatient as tenacious, I think,” Merlin replied. “He reminds me of a lot of Marines Nimue knew. Their instinct was always to attack, to push the pace and keep the other side off-balance whenever possible. When the Gbaba pushed us completely back onto the defensive, they
hated
it . . . and not just because it meant we were losing.”

“I can see that.” Cayleb nodded. “For that matter, I tend to be that way myself. The notion of giving the other side time to get set has never really appealed to me. Or, at least, not usually.”

He and Merlin smiled nastily at one another, then looked back down at the map of Corisande on the table before them.

The real problem, Cayleb reflected, was that no one involved in crafting the overall Charisian strategy had considered making their landing in Dairwyn until very late in the planning process. The possibility that Grand Duke Zebediah might be able to convince his brother-in-law to come over to the Charisian side hadn't occurred to any of them until they learned of Prince Nahrmahn's correspondence with the grand duke. Their earlier plans had called for landing in either the Barony of Brandark or the Earldom of Coris, if they'd landed east of the Dark Hills, or else much farther to the west, in the Earldom of Rochair, if they'd landed on the Margo Sound coast. In either case, the idea had been that they would establish a firm foothold, then use their amphibious capability to offset the Corisandians' greater mobility on land by leapfrogging along the coast in a series of amphibious “hooks.”

Unfortunately, the combination of the speed with which Dairos had fallen and the promptness with which Gahrvai had marched out to meet them had taken Cayleb's planners by surprise. When they hadn't been planning on landing in Dairwyn to begin with, they'd expected it to take much longer for the main bodies of the opposing armies to make contact with one another. And because that had been true, they hadn't dared to count upon fighting a decisive battle quite that quickly. And, to be fair, judged purely by the casualties inflicted as a percentage of Gahrvai's total strength, it would have been hard to call Haryl's Crossing “decisive.” Judged by those casualties as a percentage of the strength he'd actually had on the field—and, especially, as a demonstration of the relative capabilities of the two armies—that was precisely what it had been, however, and Gahrvai had been far quicker to draw the appropriate conclusions than Cayleb could have wished he'd been.

The Corisandian field commander's decision to withdraw as quickly as possible into Talbor Pass had precluded the possibility of another, larger scale Haryl's Crossing. He knew what Charisian rifles and artillery could do now, and even though Merlin's remotes confirmed that his father was working on providing him with an improvised force of riflemen of his own, he wasn't about to offer battle on Cayleb's terms unless he absolutely had to. And so, Cayleb had found himself in undisputed possession of the entire Barony of Dairwyn, the southern portion of the Earldom of Coris, and a goodly chunk of the eastern part of the Earldom of Mahrak, far earlier than anyone had expected him to. And with the Corisandian Army far closer to intact than anyone had wanted it to be.

The fact that the storm season promised to be just as active as Merlin had warned Cayleb it would be on the basis of his “meteorological satellites” (whatever
they
were) didn't help things a bit, either.

Thunder grumbled quietly from the east, as if to remind Cayleb of that very fact, and he grimaced. The storm season was bad enough in Charis, but Charis very seldom saw the powerful hurricanes which could sweep across Corisande. The sheltering bulk of Silverlode Island, which did get its share of hurricane-like storms, did much to explain that, although according to Merlin the pattern of ocean currents had at least as much to do with it. At any rate, the storms which came roaring in off the Great Western Ocean to hit Corisande were even more violent than the ones Charisians were accustomed to dealing with closer to home.

As he listened to that distant rumble of thunder, Cayleb was glad, for several reasons, that he'd sent so much of his shipping back to shelter in Zebediah and Chisholm. One reason, of course, was that it reduced congestion in Dairos and got his vital transports as safely out of the way of foul weather—and far enough north to be outside the normal hurricane zone entirely, in Chisholm's case—as he could. And if Zebediah was still right in the middle of the threat zone, the presence of a substantial number of Charisian transports and their galley and galleon escorts in Hannah Bay was a pointed reminder to Grand Duke Zebediah that any . . . adventures which might tempt him would be a bad idea.