Hell's Foundations Quiver (21 page)

Be fair, Tahd
, he reminded himself.
Not like the entire damned river's not frozen solid enough for draft dragons t' walk across! Nobody really needs a bridge t' get over it, and they bloody well won't till spring. And the poor sodding Temple Boys'd freeze to death right fast if they
did
try t' picket the thing. Still and all
.…

He lowered the glass and looked at the lance corporal on Paiair's far side.

“Go back and tell the Lieutenant there's no picket on the bridge, and I don't see anything stirring within two hundred yards of the far bank. Probably at least some poor bastards're freezing their arses off playing sentry in the forward earthworks, but I can't see 'em if they are. There's smoke from a lot of chimneys in the town and at least a couple of dozen places right behind the earthworks—I'm betting it's those dugouts the
seijins
told Baron Green Valley about—but right now it looks like they're staying close to their fires.”

“Right,” Lance Corporal Fraid Tohmys, one of 3rd Platoon's runners, replied laconically.

The odds that anyone in the town might be looking their way at this particular moment, or that they might see anything at this distance even if they did, were miniscule, but Tohmys was a scout sniper. He pushed himself backwards through the snow, not rising to a crouch until he was certain his head and shoulders would be safely below the hill's crest, then scooted down the far slope to the skis he'd left standing upright in a handy drift. He tugged them free, shoved his boots into the toe straps, and pulled back the spring-tensioned cables to lock them behind his heels. The efficiency of the Imperial Charisian Army's cross-country skis had increased significantly with the widespread availability of the cable binding which had previously been available only to wealthy ski enthusiasts who could afford the hefty price tag. The Charisian steelmakers' ability to produce strong, powerful springs, capable of standing up to hard use under sub-zero field conditions, and to produce them in quantity, had changed that, however, and the corporal moved rapidly off across the snow, heading back the way Paiair's squad had come.

“All right, Zakryah,” Ekohls said, turning back to Paiair. “Let's get somebody down into the riverbed. I want a couple of sets of eyes on the far bank.”

*   *   *

Baron Green Valley glanced at the caribou-drawn field kitchen as he trotted past it. Mounted on broad runners, the kitchen was fitted with a central island of cook stoves and framed with solid, boxlike wooden sides. For two-thirds of each side, the upper half of the outer wall formed a long, hinged panel which could be raised using cables running through pulleys at the peak of the kitchen's steep roof. In the horizontal position, those panels were about ten feet off the ground and offered at least some protection from rain or snow for someone standing under them. Counters built into the walls' inner faces gave the cooks working space, and the stoves featured metal plates which could be used as cooking surfaces or lifted aside to create wells into which specially fitted kettles could be slotted so the kitchens could cook soup or stew—or keep it hot—even as they moved cross-country. The runners turned the kitchens into sleds with excellent cross-country agility in winter, but they could also be fitted with wheels for mobility that was almost as good in summer.

The kitchen's design was one more example of the old Royal Chisholmian Army's forethought and careful planning, although the new manufacturing techniques coming out of Charis made them much cheaper and easier to build in quantity. Now, as Green Valley watched, lines of men of Company A, 3rd Battalion, 13th Regiment, 7th Brigade, of General Eystavyo Gardynyr's 4th Division (Mountain), passed smoothly along the field kitchen's sides. The cooks—in shirtsleeves, despite the icy temperatures, thanks to the heat generated by their stoves—ladled steaming tea into the tin cups held out to them and hot soup, thick with beef and vegetables, into the matching tin bowls.

Every ICA soldier was issued his own nested mess kit, which contained a skillet with a folding handle, a saucepan, individual fitted covers for both (curved so that they could be used as plates or bowls), and a steel knife, spoon, and fork. The entire remarkably compact package was closed with a leather strap that could be hooked to the canvas bread bag in which a soldier carried his combat rations and which, in turn, attached to his canvas web gear when he stripped down to combat order.

Even before the new mess kits, the Chisholmian Army's arrangements for feeding its men in the field had been better than anything available to the Army of God. As just one example, the huge iron kettles of the Church's commissaries were heavier, more cumbersome, and required far more fuel than their lighter Charisian counterparts. They were inefficient at the best of times, and if the commissary troops fell behind during troop movements (or simply got lost for a few days), the AOG troops were ill-equipped to cook their own rations. Nor did the Army of God have any equivalent of the mobile field kitchens which kept Green Valley's troops fueled with hot, nourishing food despite the arctic conditions.

And which saw to it that the men were well fed before going into battle. That was a tradition the ICA shared with the Imperial Charisian Navy, but it was even more important than usual under current conditions. The human metabolism burned energy like a furnace in arctic conditions. Good nourishment could become literally the difference between life and death when the cold bit, and that didn't even consider the morale factor inherent in being fed a hot, strengthening meal before plunging into the chaos of combat.

Green Valley looked away from the field kitchen, returning his attention to the SNARCs keeping watch over Saint Esthyr's Abbey and the farming town to which it had given its name. The SNARCs gave him an even better perspective than Sergeant Ekohls enjoyed, and their reports were both a source of profound satisfaction and one more coal for the furnace of his anger against Zhaspahr Clyntahn's “Sword of Schueler.”

Located on the east-west high road where it passed down the center of the Northland Gap, between the Meirstrom Mointains to the north and the Kalgarans to the south, Esthyr's Abbey was the better part of three hundred and sixty miles from the nearest navigable river: the Kalgaran River, just south of the fork where it joined the Ice Ash. It was surrounded by a broad belt of farmland, which had been interspersed with occasional areas of woodlot, most of it second-growth terrestrial imports. More trees—mixed terrestrial and Safeholdian evergreens, mostly—had been planted as windbreaks around farmhouses and barns, along the edges of farm lanes, and as protection for pastureland and feedlots, and the fields themselves were separated by walls of the dry-laid stones centuries of plowing had brought to the surface.

It must have been a pleasant vista once upon a time, but “once upon a time” was long vanished.

While it had served as a natural center for farming, Esthyr's Abbey had never been as large as many another major regional town in Siddarmark because of its distance from water transport. Its pre-Sword of Schueler population, never more than three thousand, had plummeted to little more than a thousand as those loyal to the Republic were killed or driven into exile—many of them to die of cold and starvation on the roads. Not that the Temple Loyalists had had it all their own way. The recent cluster of graves in the town cemetery indicated just how hard the loyalists had fought before their defeat. Nonetheless, it had still been home to almost thirteen hundred people the previous spring, and the survivors had greeted the Army of God's arrival enthusiastically. But then the Great Canal Raid devastated Bishop Militant Bahrnabai's logistics. Neither of Halcom Bahrn's ironclads had come within three hundred miles of Esthyr's Abbey, yet the raid had still given the town its deathblow.

Now less than two hundred of its original inhabitants remained; the rest had left voluntarily or been forcibly evacuated at Bahrnabai Wyrshym's orders the previous fall. The bishop militant hadn't liked giving that order—or the other orders that had effectively abandoned all of the Republic east of the Kalgarans and Meirstroms—but he'd had no option.

First, the state of his supply lines had forced him to commandeer every available scrap of transport to feed his own starving, freezing troops. That bitter truth had compelled his orders to evacuate not just Esthyr's Abbey but every other town between there and the Kalgaran River. There'd been nothing left to keep the civilians in those towns fed, and to give credit where it was due, the evacuees were both safer and better nourished in the refugee camps Rhobair Duchairn had established in the Temple Lands.

Second, it had been painfully clear the Army of God would require a heavy numerical superiority to defeat Green Valley's troops. Wyrshym had reached that conclusion on the basis of his experience in the Sylmahn Gap, but his original estimate of how great a superiority he would require had still been too low. Duke Eastshare's rout of the Army of Glacierheart and—even more—the cataclysmic destruction of the Army of Shiloh had made that brutally clear, and his original strategy had changed as a result.

His intention had been to reinforce the two divisions at Allyntyn with three more divisions before Green Valley moved in that direction. Unfortunately, when the Army of Midhold actually did move the previous fall, it had advanced more rapidly than even Wyrshym had anticipated. It had swept through central Midhold, driving out those loyal to Mother Church as it came, and its 3rd Mounted Brigade had closed in on Allyntyn before any reinforcements arrived.

In some ways, that had been just as well from Wyrshym's perspective, since his disastrous logistics made it impossible for him to sustain a force large enough to face Green Valley east of the Northland Gap. As Brigadier Mohrtyn Braisyn's mounted infantry advanced, they'd eliminated every cavalry regiment originally assigned to Bishop Qwentyn Preskyt, but before those regiments were destroyed, they'd managed to warn Preskyt that 3rd Mounted was coming. He'd semaphored the news to Wyrshym, in turn, and the bishop militant had immediately realized that Preskyt's unreinforced divisions could never hold Allyntyn. Bitter though the choice had been—and risky, in the face of Zhaspahr Clyntahn's wrath—Wyrshym had ordered Allyntyn abandoned to the advancing Charisians.

The bishop militant's decisiveness had deprived Green Valley of one of the prizes he'd sought, for Preskyt's prompt obedience had whisked the bulk of his command efficiently out of the envelopment Green Valley had planned at Allyntyn. It had been a very near thing, however, and his rearguard regiment had been trapped and destroyed when the town was captured.

Wyrshym's decision to abandon Allyntyn had transformed Esthyr's Abbey into the Army of the Sylmahn's most advanced position. Preskyt's St. Fraidyr Division and Bishop Zhaksyn Mahkhal's Port Harbor Division had dug in there, and Wyrshym had managed to replace the regiment lost in Allyntyn and find three more cavalry regiments—all understrength—to supply a little more mobility and reach.

The three divisions Wyrshym had originally earmarked for Allyntyn had been sent instead to the town of Fairkyn on the devastated Guarnak-Ice Ash Canal, and he'd scared up two more divisions to support them there, all under Bishop Gorthyk Nybar. Preskyt was instructed to keep Nybar fully informed of his situation but reported directly to Wyrshym at Guarnak. It was an awkward arrangement, yet Green Valley understood why it had been adopted, and he had to respect Wyrshym's reasoning. The bishop militant had arranged to keep Nybar out of the chain of command between himself and Preskyt in order to protect Nybar from the Grand Inquisitor if things went poorly at Esthyr's Abbey. Nybar would be fully informed about what was happening to Preskyt's command but free of any direct responsibility for it … and free to make his own decisions without looking over his shoulder at his own inquisitors and intendants.

The Army of God had no equivalent of the Charisian concept of organizing armies into corps, yet that was essentially what Wyrshym had done, and Nybar's command had been designated the Army of Fairkyn for administrative purposes. It wasn't very large as armies went: five infantry divisions and eight cavalry regiments, supported by a single regiment of artillery. If all his units had been at full strength, he would have commanded thirteen thousand men, including all of his artillerists, supported by only twenty-four twelve-pounders; in fact, he actually deployed less than eleven thousand, and keeping even that small a force adequately supplied had been difficult, although his situation had improved dramatically over the last three or four five-days.

Bishop Qwentyn Preskyt's, unfortunately, had not. Esthyr's Abbey was twice as far from Guarnak, and even though he was down to only forty-five hundred men, little more than seventy-five percent of his paper strength, keeping them fed over a thousand-mile-long winter supply line was still a nightmare.

Worse, from Wyrshym's perspective, the entire Army of the Sylmahn, including all detachments, counted barely sixty thousand men, less than eighty percent of the Army of Midhold's manpower, and its men had been more poorly armed even before the Canal Raid added starvation to the mix. True, its logistic situation had improved as Duchairn got the devastated canal net repaired with one temporary expedient after another. The entire line from East Wing Lake to Ayaltyn, a tiny town on the Hildermoss River south of Cat-Lizard Lake, was technically back in service, but Ayaltyn was still almost eight hundred miles from Wyrshym's primary forward supply center at Guarnak and the canals had already been freezing by the time Duchairn's engineers reached the town. By now they—and every river and lake north of Guarnak—were solid sheets of ice.

That had put an end to canal repairs until spring, but the ice did provide easier going for supply sleds, and Duchairn had gotten additional snow lizards and a handful of winter-hardy hill dragons forward to Wyrshym. The ragged state of his logistics prevented him from sustaining a bigger force at Esthyr's Abbey, but he'd begun building up supplies at Fairkyn to support Nybar and the heavier forces he'd earmarked to support him if Green Valley got past Esthyr's Abbey. As soon as winter released its grip and further improvements in his supply line allowed Vicar Rhobair to move up the promised reinforcements, he intended to massively reinforce Nybar. Indeed, he'd been promised a minimum of a hundred thousand fresh troops, many equipped with the new rifles and improved artillery the Church's foundries were frenetically turning out, which would give him twice Green Valley's strength and allow him to resume the offensive by early May.