Hell's Foundations Quiver (39 page)

There were bits and pieces of what had once been signalmen in that pattering, thumping deluge of wreckage, and Ghanzalvez tried—he really
tried
—not to think it served them right. He'd been none too pleased by the signal party commander's decision to use one of God's churches that way. He'd told himself he was being unreasonable. Surely God wouldn't mind, given who they were fighting against. It had still gone against the grain … and the fact that the church was barely two hundred yards west of his own position hadn't made him one bit happier. Shan-wei knew the heretic gunners were fiendishly accurate, but they weren't perfect shots, and he'd seen what one of that ironclad vessel's heavy shells could do when it landed right on top of a man's position.

And judging by what had just happened to the church in question, maybe God
had
objected to having one of His houses dragged into the middle of a war. Ghanzalvez couldn't think of any other explanation for how no less than three of the heretics' shells could have struck the same building in a single salvo. It was ridiculous! No one's artillery was that accurate, and—

The heretic guns thundered again, and that was another thing. Heavy cannon weren't supposed to be able to shoot that quickly, damn it! None of the Royal Dohlaran Army's could, anyway.

Apparently the heretic gunners didn't realize they'd already destroyed the church, he thought, trying to burrow still deeper as more explosions filled the universe. One was short of its target, and he swore again as shell splinters hissed through the air above his hole. One of those splinters actually sizzled
into
his hole and buried itself in the muddy dirt less than a foot from the private's right ear.

At the moment, a corner of Ghanzalvez' brain reflected, that fishing boat and that hurricane were sounding better and better. Almost homey, in fact.

*   *   *

Whatever the limits of rifled guns' effective ranges on the high seas, they could shoot a long, long way against targets that didn't move. The Army's rifled angle-guns had already demonstrated that. And whatever other warships might do, HMS
Delthak
had been specifically designed
not
to fight on blue water. Brown water was her home, and as her engines throbbed gently, driving her propellers just hard enough to maintain her position against the Seridahn's current, she was a perfect, stationary gun platform.

She couldn't elevate her guns as high as the angle-guns, so her maximum range was lower than it might have been, but at this moment, every inch of Evyrtyn was within her seven-mile reach. And that meant that any target Earl Hanth's artillery support parties could see, Bahrns' ship could destroy.

“Signal from Colonel Ovyrtyn, Sir!” Ahbukyra Matthysahn announced.

Halcom Bahrns lowered his double-glass and turned his head to raise an eyebrow at the young petty officer.

“Support parties say ‘Target destroyed,' Sir.” Matthysahn spoke loudly enough to be heard through the earplugs they both wore, and Bahrns nodded, then looked over his shoulder through the open conning tower door.

“Cease fire!”

His order came too late to stop the next broadside, and he coughed as the dense brown cloud of smoke erupted across the open bridge wing. The concussion of the muzzle blast would have blown his hat off his head if he hadn't already removed it.

You really don't have to be standing out here, you know
, he told himself.
In fact, it'd be a whole hell of a lot easier on you if you were smart enough to stay inside the conning tower with young Cahnyrs!

Well, of course it would. He wouldn't have been able to see as well, and the interior of the conning tower left a little something to be desired in terms of comfort and breathability when the big guns were in action, but at least the armor would have prevented his feeling as if the Tellesberg Krakens had decided to use him for batting practice. All of that was true, yet it didn't really matter. He needed to be out here in the open, where he could see and hear. Where he could keep an eye out for obstacles in the water or any more of those powder kegs the Dohlarans had floated down the river to greet them.

“New target, Sir!” Matthysahn called out, peering at the shoreside signal party through a rail-mounted telescope he could steady with his good hand, and Captain Bahrns nodded with a smile of grim satisfaction.

*   *   *

“Is this confirmed?” Sir Fahstyr Rychtyr asked, looking up from the semaphore dispatch. “
That
far?”

He stood on a hilltop above the Sheryl-Seridahn Canal, fifteen miles west of Evyrtyn, where the mounted courier had overtaken his small party. The wind was out of the west—again—and powerful enough to roar quietly through the leafless trees and winter grass, which probably explained why none of them had heard anything.

“I'm afraid it is, Sir,” Colonel Mohrtynsyn said grimly, then glanced at Rychtyr's aide. “We need the Evyrtyn artillery map, Zhulyo.”

“Of course, Sir.” Lieutenant Zhulyo Gohzail thumbed quickly through the maps in his case for the one Mohrtynsyn wanted. “Here, Sir,” he said, kneeling on the damp grass to spread the large-scale map. He weighted its corners with handy pebbles, and Rychtyr went down on one knee to look at it.

“Colonel Wykmyn isn't just guessing at the range, Sir.” Mohrtynsyn, who headed Rychtyr's headquarters staff, drew his sword and used it as a pointer. “He's confirmed that the heretic ironclad is right here.” He touched a point on the map, two-thirds of the way across the six-hundred-yard-wide river. “And he's also confirmed that it's not only destroyed the signal mast in Evyrtyn but also taken this twelve-pounder battery right here under fire.” The sword tip tapped again, and his expression was grim when he looked up at his general. “They must have observers out somewhere who can see it, because the gunners aboard that ship sure as Shan-wei can't. But we don't have any idea where those observers are or what
else
they may be able to see.”

Sir Fahstyr's jaw tightened. He glared down at the map for a moment, nodded, and stood once more. One hand brushed at the damp patch on his knee; the other had clenched around his own sword hilt. His eyes were unfocused for several seconds, staring at something only he could see. Then he drew a deep, nostril-flaring breath, and turned to the Schuelerite upper-priest at his elbow.

“It's even worse than I feared, Father,” he said in a flat, toneless voice.

“What do you mean, my son?” Father Pairaik Metzlyr, the Army of the Seridahn's special intendant, looked back at him with a worried expression. “Surely we knew the heretics would bring every weapon to bear on Evyrtyn?”

“Of course we did, Father.” Rychtyr nodded. “And we saw what that meant at Cheryk and above Trevyr.”

Metzlyr's expression went from worried to bitter and it was his turn to nod. They had, indeed, seen what HMS
Delthak
's guns could do at point-blank range. None of Major Sylvstyr's guns had survived to withdraw from his riverbank redoubt, yet so far as anyone knew, the ironclad, with its preposterously long-barreled cannon, hadn't lost a man, and it had continued to pour fire ashore afterward. Rychtyr's army had managed to retreat without disintegrating only because of the general's forethought in blocking the navigable channel with successive chains of sunken canal barges. He'd still suffered heavy casualties, and three of his regiments had sacrificed themselves holding the Marines Hanth had thrown across the river to cut off the rest of his army's retreat. But at least the blocked channel had prevented the infernal ironclad from continuing its bombardment once he disengaged and managed to fall back upriver towards Evyrtyn.

“I knew they'd come calling as soon as they cleared the obstacles,” Rychtyr continued now, his voice heavy. “I'd hoped it would take longer than it did. Or that we might have gotten lucky with the explosion rafts.”

The inquisitor nodded again, this time hard and choppy—and not because he was angry at Rychtyr or the pessimism in the general's voice.

The thinly veiled contempt for Rychtyr's judgment which had permeated the late Duke of Harless' dispatches had infuriated Metzlyr. Given how spectacularly Harless had marched into the jaws of annihilation with an army six or seven times the size of Rychtyr's, the Desnairian duke's contempt should be considered a badge of honor!

True, Rychtyr's Cheryk garrison had been surprised by the heretics' sudden attack, but Cheryk had been demoted to little more than a forward screening post for Thesmar when General Ahlverez turned the St. Alyk into his primary supply route. Manning Cheryk heavily enough to stave off a serious attack from the south would have required reducing the Trevyr garrison to no more than four or five thousand men, and Rychtyr had decided it was more important to be certain he held what had become the Army of Shiloh's most vital supply point. With luck, the screening force Harless had detached for that specific purpose would keep Hanth and his heretics penned up in Thesmar and he would hold both; if he had to lose one of them, however, the one he (and General Ahlverez) simply
could not
afford to surrender was Trevyr. Not only that, but if the Imperial Charisian Navy ever got loose on the river, Trevyr itself was only too likely to prove impossible to hold, at which point any troops deployed east of it—like at Cheryk, for example—would be cut off and doomed.

The Desnairians, predictably, had turned up their noses and ridiculed their Dohlaran allies' timidity. They'd been at least reasonably careful not to express their views of Rychtyr's feckless cowardice openly, but Metzlyr and his fellow inquisitors heard everything, sooner or later. And in fairness, the Desnairians had had at least some justification for pointing out how important Cheryk was to
their
supply line. And if he was going to be honest, the intendant had to admit that even he had thought the general was being … overly cautious, perhaps. The Seridahn, after all, was too shallow for the heretics' galleons or their accursed bombardment ships, and he hadn't quite been able to bring himself to believe the preposterous stories about smoking, self-propelled ships sheathed in iron even after the devastation of Bishop Militant Bahrnabai's communications.

But Rychtyr had been right … again.

No one was any too certain how the heretics had managed to blow a gap in that first river barrier north of Trevyr, but Rychtyr had already erected a second one farther north. There'd been less laughter about that one … and no laughter at all once the second row of sunken barges prevented the ironclad from steaming straight past and shelling the Army of the Seridahn as it retreated along the tow paths and country lanes which followed the river north.

Nor had the general settled for purely defensive measures, and the explosion rafts should have accomplished more than they had. Certainly the men who'd come forward, volunteering for the hazardous duty, had tackled their assignment with all the faith and courage the Archangels could have asked for, and conditions had seemed close to perfect. The night of the attack had been cloudy, rainy, cold, and moonless. The ten rafts—plank platforms laid across floating barrels—had each been loaded with half a ton of gunpowder, painted black, and smeared with pitch, both to make them harder to see and to protect the powder kegs from rain and riverwater, and they'd drifted with the current like darker, solider chunks of the night. Each raft had been manned by half a dozen men, working the stern sweeps and guiding the small flotilla towards its target. If even one of them had managed to get alongside the ironclad and detonate, it ought to have inflicted severe, probably crippling, and possibly fatal damage.

But the heretics had anchored a heavy boom between a trio of barges upstream from the anchored warship, and they'd positioned field guns and those infernal infantry angle-guns to cover the boom. Even worse, perhaps, they'd put riflemen aboard the barges, ready to sweep the river's surface with bullets, and one of their accursed illuminating rockets had burst overhead, revealing the rafts with pitiless clarity while they were still two hundred yards short of the boom. None of them had survived. The best the sixty men who'd given their lives for God and Mother Church had been able to do was to sink one of the boom-anchoring barges.

And now this.

Rychtyr had placed yet another barrier across the river below Evyrtyn, but the heretic engineers continued to show Shan-wei's own demonic energy. Heretic infantry, probing up the river, covered and supported by the ironclad's guns, had secured the eastern bank and dug in to provide their engineers with cover as they labored to clear the river. Despite more rain, fog, and the iciness of the riverwater, they'd dealt with the barrier—blown it to pieces just like the others, actually—in a bare two days, ripping yet another gap for the ironclad to creep through. And then, of course, Rychtyr's forward regiments had been forced to withdraw into the Evyrtyn entrenchments. Where.…

“Father, they're accurately engaging targets over three miles back from the river,” Rychtyr said into the Schuelerite's thoughts. “To be honest, we don't have any way of knowing they can't reach even farther than that, and unless they screw up and let us get an explosion raft through after all, there's not a single thing we can do to stop that damned ship from systematically destroying all of the town's defenses.” He met the upper-priest's eyes levelly. “By itself, the ironclad can't take Evyrtyn away from us. Hanth's
army
, though—that's another matter. And what the ironclad
can
do—what it's already
doing
—is massacre any artillery we try to use to defend the town. Our entrenchments offer good protection against rifle fire, but they're weak enough against field guns and infantry angles. Against the kind of fire that ironclad can hand out, they're death traps. They'll knock out our own artillery so their infantry can get close enough to take us under fire with their angle-guns. They'll keep our men's heads down with their angles and field artillery, then work their troops forward until they can storm our trenches with grenades and bayonets. I can bleed them, but nowhere near as badly as
they
can bleed
us
, and you've read the dispatches from Gorath.”