"Yes, Lord. And the city's residents? The refugees?"
"Not my affair!" snapped Samudra. "Tell the commander to abandon them-and if any try to follow his army, cut them down. We do not have room for those refugees here, either. Soon enough, we'll be fighting for our lives."
* * *
The next morning, the group of priests left behind by Link forced their way into Samudra's bunker.
"You cannot abandon Multan!" shouted the head priest.
But Samudra had known they would come, and had prepared for it. By now, all of his officers were as sick and tired of the priests as he was.
"Arrest them," he commanded.
It was done quickly, by a specially selected unit of Ye-tai. After the squawking priests were shoved into the bunker set aside for them, the commander of the Ye-tai unit reported back to Samudra.
"When, Lord?"
Samudra hesitated. But not for long. This step, like all the others he had taken, was being forced upon him. He had no choices, any longer.
"Do it now. There's no point in waiting. But make sure-certain, you understand-that there is no trace of evidence left. When"-he almost said if-"we have to answer to Great Lady Sati, there can be no questions."
"Yes, Lord."
* * *
The Ye-tai commander got promoted that evening. The explosion that destroyed the bunker and all the priests in it was splendidly handled. Unfortunate, of course, that by sheer chance a Roman rocket had landed a direct hit on it. Still more unfortunate, that the priests had apparently been so careless as to store gunpowder in the bunker.
The mahamimamsa who might have disputed that-which they would have, since they would have been the ones to handle the munitions-had vanished also. Nothing so fancy for them, however. By now, the open sewers that had turned most of the huge Malwa army camp into a stinking mess contained innumerable bodies. Who could tell one from the other, even if anyone tried?
* * *
By the following day, in any event, it was clear that no one ever would. The epidemic Samudra feared had arrived, finally, erupting from the multitude of festering spots of disease. Soon, there would be too many bodies to burn. More precisely, they no longer had enough flammable material in the area to burn them. The sewers and the rivers would have to serve instead.
Perhaps, if they were lucky, the bodies floating down the Indus and the Chenab would spread the disease into the Roman lines in the Iron Triangle.
* * *
By the time Link and its army returned to the banks of the Ganges, the cyborg that ruled the Malwa empire was as close to what humans would have called desperation as that inhuman intelligence could ever become. It was a strange sort of desperation, though; not one that any human being would have recognized as such.
For Link, the universe consisted solely of probabilities. Where a human would have become desperate from thinking doom was almost certain, Link would have handled such long odds with the same uncaring detachment that it assessed very favorable probabilities.
The problem lay elsewhere. It was becoming impossible to gauge the probabilities at all. The war was dissolving into a thing of sheer chaos, with all data hopelessly corrupted. A superhuman intelligence that could have assessed alternate courses of action and chosen among them based on lightning-quick calculations, simply spun in circles. Its phenomenal mind had no more traction than a wheel trapped in slick mud.
Dimly, and for the first time, a mentality never designed to do so understood that its great enemy had deliberately aimed for this result.
Bizarre. Link could understand the purpose, but slipped whenever it tried to penetrate the logic of the thing. How could any sane mind deliberately seek to undermine all probabilities? Deliberately strive to shatter all points of certainty? As if an intelligent being were a mindless shark, dissolving all logic into a fluid through which it might swim.
For the millionth time, Link examined the enormous records of the history of warfare that it possessed. And, finally, for the first time-dimly-began to realize that the ever-recurrent phrase "the art of war" was not simply a primitive fetish. Not simply the superstitious way that semi-savages would consider the science of armed conflict.
It almost managed something a human would have called resentment, then. Not at its great enemy, but at the new gods who had sent it here on its mission. And failed to prepare it properly.
But the moment was fleeting. Link was not designed to waste time considering impossibilities. The effort it had taken the new gods to transport Link and its accompanying machinery had almost exhausted them economically. Indeed, the energy expenditure had been so great that they had been forced to destroy a planet in the doing.
Their own. The centuries of preparation-most of it required by the erection of the power and transmission grids that had blanketed the surface-could not possibly have been done on any other planet. Not with the Great Ones moving between the star systems, watching everything.
The surviving new gods-the elite of that elite-had retreated to a heavily fortified asteroid to await the new universe that Link would create for them. They could defend themselves against the Great Ones, from that fortress, but could not possibly mount another intervention into human history.
They had taken a great gamble on Link. An excellent gamble, with all the probability calculations falling within the same margin of near-certainty.
And now. .
Nothing but chaos. How was Link to move in that utterly alien fluid?
* * *
"Your commands, Great Lady?"
Link's sheath looked up at the commander of the army. Incredibly, it hesitated.
Not long enough, of course, for the commander himself to notice. To a human, a thousandth of second was meaningless.
But Link knew. Incredibly, it almost said: "I'm not sure. What do you recommend?"
It did not, of course. Link was not designed to consider impossibilities.
Chapter 36
The Ganges plain, north of Mathura
As he'd hoped he would, Belisarius caught the Mathura garrison while it was still strung out in marching order.
"They're trying to form up squares," Abbu reported, "but if you move fast you'll get there before they can finish. They're coming up three roads and having trouble finding each other. The artillery's too far back, too." The old bedouin spat on the ground. "They're sorry soldiers."
"Garrison duty always makes soldiers sluggish, unless they train constantly." Ashot commented. "Even good ones."
The Armenian officer looked at Belisarius. "Your orders?"
"Our cataphracts are the only troops we've got who are really trained as mounted archers. Take all five hundred of them-use Abbu's bedouin as a screen-and charge them immediately. Bows only, you understand? Don't even think about lances and swords. Pass down the columns and rake them-but don't take any great risks. Stay away from the artillery. If they're already too far back, they'll never get up in position past a mass of milling infantrymen."
Ashot nodded. "You just want me to keep them confused, as long as I can."
"Exactly." Belisarius turned and looked at the huge column of Rajput cavalry following them. Using the term "column" loosely. Most of the cavalry were young men, eager for glory now that a real battle finally looked to be in the offing. Their ranks, never too precise at the best of times, were getting more ragged by the minute as the more eager ones pressed forward.