“I’ll go kick Dhugahl’s arse up between his ears,” he told Phiery now. “Tell Jelmart and Vermahka that their reliefs’ll be on the way shortly. Very shortly.”
* * *
“Not a sound.” Junior-Armsman Saith chan Kilvaryk’s voice was barely audible, but none of 2nd Squad’s men had any trouble understanding him. “The Senior said he’d have your guts for boot laces if anybody gives this away, but I wouldn’t worry about him. First you’d have to live through what I’ll do to you.”
The squad nodded as one. They didn’t really think chan Kilvaryk would murder them out of hand…but they weren’t prepared to place any bets on that.
“All right,” the junior-armsman said after sweeping his dark eyes back and forth across them for several seconds. “Chan Nysik, a lot of this is on you. You need to get into position fast.”
“Gotcha, Junior.”
Chan Nysik was a couple of years older than chan Kilvaryk, and while he’d never had any ambition to rise above his present rank of Armsman 1/c, he was as solid and reliable as the rocky crags of his native Mulgethia’s mountains. He was also very tall and powerfully built. The Faraika machine-gun weighed over a hundred and twenty pounds, but he carried it with little apparent effort while his assistant made heavy going of its tripod, which weighed barely fifty. Now he gave chan Kilvaryk a lazy, confident smile.
“Don’t you worry, Junior,” he said. “Once Larthy and me are in position with old Maragleth”-he hefted the machine gun in his arms with a smile which showed a missing tooth-“ain’t none of them Arcanans getting past us.”
“Glad to hear it,” chan Kilvaryk said dryly. He gave his entire squad one more beady-eyed look, then jerked his head in a “follow me” gesture, turned on his heel, and started forward.
* * *
“I hope this works as well as I’ve convinced everyone else it will, Doc,” Grithair chan Mahsdyr muttered to the man beside him as his company moved forward.
Platoon-Captain Fezar chan Birhahl, Gold Company’s senior healer, snorted in amusement.
“Well, you certainly didn’t sound to me as if you had any doubts about it, Sir,” he said.
“Of course I didn’t!” Chan Mahsdyr shook his head. “First thing they teach you is to always sound like you know what you’re doing even if you don’t have a clue. In this case, I’m pretty sure I do have a clue. I’m just not sure what else I have.”
“Surprise, for one thing,” chan Birhahl replied much more seriously, and chan Mahsdyr grunted.
“Looks like it, anyway,” he acknowledged. “And that’s the most dangerous weapon there is, really, when you come down to it.”
Chan Birhahl was a healer, but he’d been around soldiers who weren’t healers long enough to understand exactly what the company-captain meant, and he nodded in agreement.
All the Distance Viewers attached to Gold Company agreed that both the Arcanans in the ruins of Fort Rensar and those in the far more substantial-and comfortable-permanent bivouac in the valley of the Graystone River showed absolutely no awareness that there were any Sharonians in their vicinity. It was remotely possible they knew all about Gold Company and were setting some sort of subtle trap based on yet another unknown magical ability, but it seemed unlikely. This was one of the times when chan Mahsdyr passionately wished that he had at least a touch of the Distance Viewer Talent himself and could have avoided the need to rely on the reports of the observations of others.
Isn’t any different from relying on any other report from a forward scout, Grithair, he told himself firmly. Just keep remembering that.
And, if the Distance Viewers were correct about that element of surprise, it meant Gold Company and the rest of 2nd Battalion had gotten all the way to the very doorstep of Thermyn without any Arcanan seeing a thing.
Of course, that just puts even more pressure on us to make sure the bastards behind them stay equally fat, dumb, and ignorant. It’s still thirteen hundred miles to Fort Ghartoun, even after we’re through the portal. Plenty of time for them to arrange something nasty if we fuck up at this point!
At least the terrain favored them. The only really tricky bit was getting past the miserable, cold squad or two of Arcanans who’d staked out the ruins of the fort. The dry riverbed below the portal provided quite a lot of cover for men as well trained at wringing every possible advantage out of any terrain feature as those of the 3rd Dragoons. Its depth gave excellent cover against anyone at the level of the riverbank, at least until they were most of the way across. Better yet, the angled portal itself created a huge blind spot. If he’d been in charge of picketing it, he’d have had positions for two or three section-sized outposts stretched across each aspect, but especially on the southern side, where the river had disappeared into Thermyn. That would have given him an excellent chance of spotting anyone trying to sneak across the river towards him.
But the Arcanans hadn’t done that. Fort Rensar had been designed as an administrative node, not a serious defensive work, and while it had an excellent view of the portion of the Tyrahl River which still had water in it, its view of the empty bed beyond the portal was badly restricted by the portal itself. By moving a mile or so downstream, chan Mahsdyr’s men had been able to cross the channel without anyone at the fort seeing a thing. Worse-or, actually, better from his perspective-it was obvious the idiot who’d picked the location for their main encampment hadn’t thought about the fact his forward pickets had such an enormous blind spot. If there’d been one approach route chan Mahsdyr would have worried about, it was the empty riverbed, not the one that was still full of icy cold, rushing water, yet the southwesternmost edge of the portal completely concealed it from anyone in the Graystone’s valley just as completely as from Fort Rensar. They literally couldn’t see anything coming around the portal’s eastern aspect. Why in Chindarsu’s name they hadn’t pulled their encampment all the way back to the Thermyn side of the portal if they weren’t going to picket this side adequately was more than chan Mahsdyr was prepared to guess.
He wasn’t about to complain, however. His maps were both detailed and highly accurate, updated by the TTE’s surveyors to account for any discrepancies between the purely local geography of Nairsom and that of Sharona. With that advantage, it hadn’t been difficult to pick his approach route to the spot he wanted. He imagined his men-especially those of the mortar platoon-were inventing imaginative curses for him at the moment as they struggled across the rugged terrain, but he was fine with that. And they’d be fine with it, too, if they managed to get into position without being spotted.
“Well, Doc, I guess it’s time we were heading out, too.”
* * *
Commander of Fifty Gilthar Vurth closed the door of 2nd Platoon’s mess hall chansyu hut and stood on the front step, idly picking his teeth with a toothpick. It was getting on towards evening-days were short this early in the year and this far north-and the cooks were about ready to start serving dinner. As Thimanus Gorzalt’s senior platoon commander and acting executive officer, it was one of Vurth’s self-appointed duties to sample each meal and make certain it was worthy of the Union of Arcana’s fighting men.
It wasn’t like he had anything else to do out here in the middle of absolutely nowhere.
He grimaced at the thought and wondered once again what god or demon he’d offended to end up under Gorzalt’s command. Of course, the 451st Regiment was a far cry from one of the Army’s elite units, like the 2nd Andaran Scouts. No doubt there was some sort of seismic settling process which inexorably moved less than scintillating officers into its ranks and away from those more elite units. The only problem with that theory was that while it explained how Gorzalt had ended up in the 451st, it didn’t explain what Vurth was doing here.