Storm Warning (38 page)

The Valdemarans were, must be, offering covert support and organizing the resistance, no matter how much they might pretend otherwise. It was a situation that simply should never have occurred, and what was more, it made no sense. Until the moment of Ancar’s death, Valdemar had been locked in war with Hardorn. That state of war should have continued, even with Ancar slain. Valdemar should have been grateful to see someone else trouncing their enemy. They should have been as happy to see the Imperial troops marching into Hardorn as the poor oppressed citizens of Hardorn itself.

As had been reported, the conquest of Hardorn had slowed to a crawl, and it had become much more expensive in terms of men and material than had been projected. The situation was worse than he had expected. The Empire ran by close accounting; sometimes he suspected it was the accountants that actually ruled it. Every unexpected loss meant resources would have to be reshuffled from elsewhere.

He buried his face in his hands for a moment. He was tired, mortally tired. He’d spent every waking hour since he had arrived trying to staunch the hemorrhage this campaign had become, and he had been awake for far too many hours in the day. Now, at least, they were no longer losing men and supplies at the rate they
had
been, but the situation had turned into a stalemate. They could not go forward, but could not go back, either. They could not even move in the support troops, for the countryside that had been “taken” had not yet been pacified.

I have to make a decision,
he realized wearily.
I can try to press on, as General Sheda did, or I can make this temporary halt more permanent, consolidate what we have, and try to figure out how to break the deadlock.

He had already made far too many command decisions that he was going to have to justify later. There were spies in the ranks; he knew that, and he also did not know who all of them were. He came into this too late to put enough of his own men inside to be really effective at ferreting out who belonged to whom. Some of the agents in place were spies for his rivals, some for the Emperor, some spied only to sell information to the highest bidder. That was the problem with Imperial politics; if you served in any official capacity, you had to worry as much about enemies from within as enemies of the Empire.

I didn’t expect to have to make decisions this risky the moment I took command.
His stomach burned, and there was a sour taste in the back of his throat no amount of wine could wash away.
And how is it going to look to the Emperor when the first major order I give is for a retrenchment? He told me to conquer Hardorn, not sit on my heels and study it! I’ll look weak, indecisive. Hardly the qualities for an Imperial Successor.

“Uncomfortable” was an inadequate description for the situation, although that was how he had politely worded it in his first dispatch back to the Emperor.

He took his hands away from his burning eyes and studied the map again, this time ignoring the taunting shape of Valdemar.
Ignore them. Pretend for the moment that they do not exist. Now study the tactical display.

It showed far too many hot spots behind his own lines, areas where there were still attacks on the troops, where there were pockets of resistance that melted away like snow in the summer whenever he brought troops in to crush them. This was
not
pacified territory. He could not and would not ask support troops to come into a situation like this one. It would not be a case of risking their lives, it would be a case of throwing their lives away.

I will have to retrench,
he decided. He took up a pen, and studied the map again, then drew a line.
Here
—
to here.
The Imperial troops would retreat until they were all behind the line he drew on the map. Most of the resistance was on the other side of that line; such pockets of trouble as still remained could
probably
be dealt with in an efficient manner.

I hope,
he thought glumly, writing up his orders and ringing for his aide to take them to his mage. A great weight lifted from his shoulders the moment the boy took the rolled paper, although a new set of worries descended on him in its wake.

It was done; there was no turning back. In a few moments, the mage would have magical duplicates of the orders in the hands of the mages attached to every one of his commanders, and the retreat would begin.

He rang for another aide as soon as the first had left. “Bring me the battle reports again,” he told the boy. “This time just for Sector Four. And set up the table for me. Leave the reports on it.”

The boy bowed, and took himself out. When Tremane finally gathered enough strength to rise and go out into the strategy room, the reports were waiting, and the plotting table had been set up with the map of Sector Four and the counters representing Commander Jaman’s troops were waiting along the side of the table, off the map.

At least he had this thick-walled, stone manor as a command post, and not the tent he had brought with him. The weather around here was fout—no, it was worse than foul. Out of every five days, it stormed on three. Outside the windows, a storm raged at this moment, lashing the thick, bubbly glass with so much rain it looked as if the manor stood in the heart of a waterfall. It would have been impossible to do anything in a tent right now, except hope it didn’t blow over.

These people knew how to build a proper fireplace, and a sound chimney, which edged them a little more into the ranks of the civilized so far as Tremane was concerned. One of those well-built fireplaces was in every room of the suite he had chosen for himself. A good fire crackled cheerfully at his back as he lined up the counters and began to replicate the movement described in the battle reports.

He had chosen Sector Four because it was typical of what had been happening all along the front lines, and because Jaman wrote exceptionally clear and detailed reports. But this time, he did not put any of the counters representing the enemy on the table; Jaman had not been able to
really
count the enemy troops, and everything he wrote in those reports about enemy numbers was, by his own admission, a guess. Instead, Tremane laid out only the Imperial counters, and dispassionately observed what happened to them.

By the time he had played out the reports right up to today’s, he
knew
why the Imperial army, trained and strictly disciplined, was failing. It was there for anyone to see, if they simply observed what was happening, rather than insisting it
couldn’t
happen.

The Imperial troops were failing because they were trained and strictly disciplined.

If there was any organization in the enemy resistance at all, it was a loose one, and one which allowed all the individual commanders complete autonomy in what they did. The enemy struck at targets of opportunity, and only when there was a chance that their losses would be slim. The Empire was not fighting real troops—even demoralized ones. It was fighting against people who weren’t soldiers but who knew their own land.

Disciplined troops couldn’t cope with an enemy that wouldn’t make a stand, who wouldn’t hold a line and fight, who melted away as soon as a counter-attack began. They couldn’t deal with an enemy who attacked out of nowhere, in defiance of convention, and faded away into the countryside without pressing his gains. The Hardornens were waging a war of attrition, and it was working.

How could the army even begin to deal with an enemy who lurked
behind
the lines, in places supposed to be pacified and safe? The farmer who sold the Imperial cooks turnips this morning might well be taking information to the resistance about how many turnips were sold, why, and where they were going! And he could just as easily be one of the men with soot-darkened faces who burst upon the encampment the very same night, stealing provisions and weapons, running off mounts, and burning supply wagons.

And as for the enemy mages—
his
mages were convinced there weren’t any. They found no sign of magic concealing troop-movements, of magical weapons, or even of scrying to determine what
their
moves might be. But he had analyzed their reports as well, and he had come to a very different conclusion.

The enemy mages are concentrating on only one thing—keeping the movements of the resistance troops an absolute secret.
That was the only way to explain the fact that none,
none
of his mages had ever been able to predict a single attack.

They weren’t keeping those movements a secret by the “conventional” means of trying to make their troops invisible, either. They didn’t have to—the countryside did that for them. There were no columns of men, no bivouacs for Tremane’s mages to find, no signs of real troops at all for FarSeeing mages to locate. That meant it was up to the Forescryers to predict when the enemy would attack.

And they could not, for the enemy’s mages were flooding the front lines with hundreds of entirely specious visions of troop movements. By the time the Imperial mages figured out which were the false visions and which were the reality, it was too late; the attack was usually over.

In a way, he had to admire the mind that was behind that particular plan. There was nothing easier to create than an illusion which existed nowhere except in the mind. It was an extremely efficient use of limited resources—and an effective one as well.

The only way of combating such a tactic was to keep the entire army in a combat-ready state at all times, day or night.

Try to keep troops in that state, day after day, when nothing whatsoever happened, and before long they lost so much edge and alertness that when a real attack did come, they couldn’t defend effectively against it. They would slip, drop their guard, grow weary—and only
then
would the attack come. There was no way to prevent such slips, either; people grew tired.

The enemy wasn’t using mages to predict when troops had gone stale; he didn’t have to. The very children playing along the roads could do that.

Perfectly logical, a brilliant use of limited resources. The only problem was, it fit the pattern of a country that was well-organized, one with people fiercely determined to defend themselves against interlopers, not a land ravaged by its own leaders and torn by internal conflict.

He turned away from the tactics table and faced the window, staring into the teeth of the storm.
We never move in until and unless conditions inside the country we wish to annex are intolerable. The arrival of our troops must represent a welcome relief—so that we can be seen by the common people as
liberators,
not oppressors. King Ancar certainly created those conditions here!

In fact, if half of what he had read in the reports was actually true and not rumor, Ancar would have had a revolt of his own on his hands within the next five or ten years. When Imperial troops had first crossed the border, in fact, they
had
been greeted as saviors. So what had happened between then and now to change that?

It can’t be the tribute, we haven’t levied it yet.
Imperial taxes amounted to sixty percent of a conquered land’s products every year—and the conscription of all young men between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one. But none of that had been imposed yet; it never was until after all of the benefits of living within the Empire were established. By the time the citizens had used the freshwater aqueducts, the irrigation and flood-retention systems, the roads, and most of all, the Imperial Police, they were generally tolerant of the demands the Empire made on them in return.

The taxes were adjusted every year to conform to the prosperity (or lack of it) in that year—the farmer and the businessman was left with forty percent of what he had earned, instead of having all of it taken from him—and he didn’t have to worry about the safety of his wife, daughter, or sister. Women could take the eggs to market and the sheep to pasture without vanishing.

If there was any grumbling, it was generally the conduct of the Imperial Police that changed the grumbling to grudging acceptance of the situation. Imperial citizens and soldiers lived under the same hard code as conquered people. Even in the first-line shock troops, the Code was obeyed to the letter. The Imperial Code was impartial and absolutely unforgiving.

The Law is the Law.
And it was the same for everyone; no excuses, no exceptions, no “mitigating circumstances.”

Assault meant punishment detail for a soldier, and imprisonment with hard labor for a civilian. A thief, once caught, was levied fines equal to twice the value of what he had stolen, with half going to the ones whose property he had taken, and half to the Empire; if he had no money, he would work in a labor camp with his wages going to those fines until they were paid. If the thief was also a soldier, his wages in the army were confiscated, and his term lengthened by however long it took to pay the fine. Murder was grounds for immediate execution, and no one in his right mind would
ever
commit rape. The victim would be granted immediate status as a divorced
spouse.
Half of the perpetrator’s possessions went to the victim, half of the perpetrator’s wages went to the victim for a term of five years if there was no child, or sixteen years if a child resulted. If the child was a daughter,
she
received a full daughter’s dowry out of whatever the perpetrator had managed to accumulate, and if the child was a son, the perpetrator paid for his full outfitting when he was conscripted. That was a heavy price to pay for a moment of lust-anger, and rape was much less of a problem within the Empire than outside of it. The second Emperor had determined that attacking a person’s purse was far more effective as a deterrent to crime than mere physical punishment.