The tsunami coming out of Charis would simply bury the Mighty Host and the Army of God on the field of battle. That was obvious to both him and Maigwair, however resolutely Clyntahn might continue to insist that a man armed with a rock and the invincible spirit of God was superior to any rifle-armed heretic ever born. And since there was no hope of preventing the sprawling Charisian merchant fleet from delivering those ever-increasing numbers of weapons to their armies, Mother Church’s only hope was to find a way to eliminate the armies themselves before the tidal wave destroyed everything in its path. Which, given the past record of the Army of God and its allies, would be a … nontrivial challenge, Duchairn thought mordantly.
“How likely do you really think it is that Rainbow Waters will be able to follow his campaign plan? His actual plan, I mean; not the one he’s officially submitted for approval.”
“Noticed that, did you?” Maigwair gave the treasurer a lopsided smile. “Careful to hide it all in the ‘contingencies’ section, wasn’t he?” The captain general shook his head in admiration. “Just between you and me, I’ve never really liked Harchongese bureaucrats very much. Always seemed to me that they were even worse than our bureaucrats! But there are times when a good, bluff military man such as myself can only watch in awe and admiration as they dance rings around their superiors.”
Duchairn chuckled, but Maigwair was right. Rainbow Waters—or someone on his staff, at least—obviously understood the fine art of obfuscation even better than most Harchongians, and the earl knew exactly what Zhaspahr Clyntahn wanted to hear. Duchairn was fairly sure he also appreciated the way Harchong’s monumental loyalty to Mother Church inclined the Grand Inquisitor to put far more faith in a Harchongese commander than in anyone else. He’d certainly played to that inclination with consummate skill! His official dispatches were brimful of the offensive spirit, pointing out the way in which his fortifications and massive supply dumps would enable him to operate with far greater freedom once the weather permitted a general advance. And in the meantime, of course, they provided security against any sudden, unexpected move by the heretics.
What he very carefully hadn’t pointed out was that he had absolutely no intention of ordering any of the general advances he’d laid out in such enthusiastic detail, supply base or no. His calculation of the military realities—which he’d shared privately with Maigwair, via an oral report delivered by Archbishop Militant Gustyv Walkyr—was that the sustained, rapid fire of the Charisians’ new rifles and revolvers, coupled with their portable angle-guns and heavier artillery, would make any assault prohibitively expensive. He had the manpower to “win” at least some offensive battles simply by throwing bodies at the enemy, but the process would gut even the Mighty Host of God and the Archangels. And, given the Charisians’ greater mobility, any assault he launched, however brilliantly it succeeded, was unlikely to prove decisive, since he couldn’t prevent his enemies from slipping away and eluding pursuit.
He hadn’t said a single word about that in any of his written reports. Acknowledging that Mother Church couldn’t possibly take the war to her enemies and win wasn’t something Zhaspahr Clyntahn wanted to hear, even out of a Harchongian. And despite his … pragmatic awareness of the realities he faced, the earl himself remained far from defeated, because he’d also calculated that those same realities favored the defense whoever happened to be doing the defending. Having faced that starting point squarely, he’d proceeded to throw away the rule book—even the brand-new one, devised by the Army of God—and created an entirely new operational approach. He’d even come up with a term to summarize his new thinking: the “tactical defense/strategic offense,” he called it. And from Maigwair’s description of it, it struck Duchairn as commendably clear and logical.
The earl had no intention of simply lying down and dying—or running away—whenever the Charisians finally put in their appearance. His “defense in depth” would slow their attack, bleed their forces, force them to use up manpower, weapons, and ammunition fighting their way through one fortified position after another. And then, at the moment they were fully extended, he would launch his counteroffensive. With luck, the enemy would be caught off-balance and forced back, possibly even fully or partially enveloped and destroyed in detail. At the very least, his armies should be able to regain their original positions for a far lower price than that opponent had paid to push them back in the first place.
In fact, the difference in price tags might—might—be enough to offset the Charisians’ preposterous ability to conjure new manufactories out of thin air. In his bleaker moments, Duchairn suspected that hope was whistling in the dark, but what he knew for certain was that it was the only approach which offered even a possibility of success.
No doubt if Rainbow Waters’ strategy had been honestly explained to Clyntahn—which, thank God, no one had any intention of doing—the Grand Inquisitor would have denounced it as defeatist, since it conceded the offensive to the enemy. He might even have been right about that. The problem was that any other strategy would simply lead to Mother Church’s far speedier collapse.
Duchairn winced as he used the noun “collapse” even in the privacy of his own thoughts, but there was no point pretending. He and his hideously overworked staff had done a better job of propping up Mother Church’s finances than he’d ever dared hope they might. Yet despite every miracle they’d worked, they were only rearranging deck chairs as the ship foundered beneath them. Revenue streams were better than projected, and the initial response to his “Victory Bonds” had been far more favorable than anticipated, yet the civilian side of the ecnomy teetered on the very brink of collapse. He’d declared freezes of both wages and prices and instituted rationing—managed by the parish priests—of the most critical commodties, backed up by the full power of the Inquisition, but that had only succeeded in driving the price increases underground. Unless they were willing to equate black marketeering with treason to the Jihad and resort to the Punishment for violations—which he flatly refused to do—that was only going to get worse, and nothing he or the Inquisition did seemed able to halt the increasingly steep discount of the Temple’s new, printed marks in favor of gold and silver. As of his last monthly report, the “exchange rate” was running at over sixty-to-one in favor of hard coinage, and despite the persistent (and accurate, unfortunately) rumors that the Temple’s more recently coined marks had been adulterated, the differential continued to climb. The steadily approaching failure of his fiscal structure was inevitable, and the ever more drastic lengths to which he’d gone to stave it off as long as possible were only going to make the crash even more catastrophic when it finally occurred.
By the time the summer campaign season began in northern Haven and Howard, the Mighty Host would have just under two million men in the field. The newly revitalized Army of God, straining every sinew over the winter, would have almost eight hundred thousand new troops with the colors; combined with its surviving strength from the previous year, Mother Church would have just over a million men of her own.