Or I hope to hells it doesn’t, anyway, he reflected.
He shrugged and turned toward the barren, unkempt “parade ground” Gorzalt had insisted on laying out between the mess hall and his HQ hut. It hadn’t gotten a lot of use since Thousand Carthos pulled back to rejoin the main expeditionary force in Traisum. Vurth tried to make sure all the men were inspected at least weekly and got at least some time on the firing range every week. It shouldn’t have been difficult, but Gorzalt seemed to have withdrawn into a sulk when he realized who was being left behind to picket the portal, and the rest of C Company appeared to have caught the malaise from its CO. Well, aside from Zakar Ustmyn, at least, and look what Ustmyn’s attitude had gotten him!
Vurth shook his head in disgust-disgust directed almost as much at himself as at Gorzalt-and started across the “parade ground” as the shadows cast by the high ground to the northwest began to creep over it.
* * *
“Platoon-Captain chan Urhal’s in position, Sir.”
Grithair chan Mahsdyr took the hastily scribbled note from Armsman 1/c chan Tylwyr, his company Flicker, and managed-somehow-not to say “At last!” It would have been unprofessional, unfair to Jersalma chan Urhal’s 3rd Platoon, and a case of blaming the wrong person, anyway. He’d been right about the way the terrain would cover his approach, but he’d made insufficient allowance for how it would slow that approach. For the last hour or so, he’d been afraid he was going to lose the light before all of his men were in place. That would have left him with the choice of mounting a night attack or waiting in position-without cover and without bedrolls-until dawn. Neither was a palatable alternative, although he was pretty sure he’d have gone with the first if it came to it. Surprise and darkness should let them sweep up the entire Arcanan encampment, but that same darkness would make it much easier for someone to get away with word of Gold Company’s presence.
Now, fortunately, he wouldn’t have to. He still had at least forty-five minutes, more likely an hour and a half. That should be plenty of time.
“All right, Shodan,” he told chan Tylwyr. “It’s time. Pass the word.”
“Yes, Sir!”
The Flicker gave him a quick, broad smile, and then concentrated on the neat row of metal message tubes laid out in front of him. They vanished in rapid, silent succession, as quickly as a Faraika spat out bullets, and chan Mahsdyr raised his field glasses and looked down from the ridgeline.
He stood barely eight hundred yards from the center of the Arcanan outpost, looking down from the top of a five hundred-foot hill. The Graystone’s valley widened at this point, so its further side was almost fourteen hundred yards from his present position. That was farther than he really liked, but the contour lines were also much steeper and he’d gotten chan Urhal’s platoon down onto the valley floor itself. That was one reason this had taken so long; 3rd Platoon had been forced to swing substantially wider than the rest of his attack force. That was the bad news. The good news was that chan Urhal had managed to use the Graystone’s bed to infiltrate to within little more than three hundred yards of the encampment without being spotted.
Now, as chan Tylwyr’s Flicked message tubes reached their destinations, half a dozen mortars opened fire.
* * *
Gilthar Vurth was halfway across Thimanus Gorzalt’s parade ground when the first mortar bomb landed.
The two support platoons assigned to Gold Company were equipped with light, three-inch mortars, not the much heavier four-and-a-half-inch weapons of a heavy mortar company, and chan Mahsdyr had brought only one platoon across the riverbed. The three-inch projectiles weighed less than a third as much as those of their bigger brethren and, at four thousand yards, they had only two thirds the range. But they had ample reach for the task in hand, and their seven-pound bombs came sliding down the frigid air with the sound of whispering silk.
Vurth just had time to register the mortars’ muted coughs. It wasn’t much to hear, really, because they were emplaced in the dead ground behind the hill upon which chan Mahsdyr had taken up his position. The fifty’s head came up, turning as he tried to determine the peculiar sounds’ direction. Unfortunately for him, he’d never heard mortar fire before. He had no idea what he’d heard, and the incoming fire arrived long before he could figure it out.
He’d never heard mortars firing before, and he’d never hear them again, either. One of the plunging bombs landed barely fifteen feet from him and the blast hurled his broken, bleeding body back into the front wall of the mess hall. He oozed down it in a broad, crimson streak of blood, his eyes already settling into the dull, fixed stare of death.
* * *
Commander of One Hundred Thimanus Gorzalt jerked upright in his chair as the explosions thundered. He sprang to his feet, eyes wide, expression incredulous, and wheeled toward the single window in the chansyu hut’s southern wall.
He got there just as another mortar bomb impacted on the hut’s roof almost directly above him.
* * *
Sword Trymayn Ilkathym heard a voice bellowing orders, fighting to bring some sort of order out of the sudden, terrifying chaos. It took him a moment to realize the voice belonged to him…and that he didn’t hear a single one of C Company’s officers. He knew he wouldn’t hear Gilthar Vurth’s. He’d been waiting for the fifty on the far side of the parade ground when the first Sharonian fire exploded like Shartahk’s own thunderbolts. He’d seen his fifty blown backwards, seen him smash into the mess hall’s wall and ooze down it, and he’d seen more than enough dead men to recognize one more.
Then he heard something no Arcanan had ever heard before. He heard the high, fiercely snarling wolf’s howl of ancient Ternathia and the wild music of the war pipes of the mountains of Delkrathia. The Imperial Ternathian Army had adopted those pipes more than two millennia ago, and their savage voice had played Ternathia’s soldiers to victory on more battlefields than even the best military historian could have counted.
And then the Faraika machine guns which had been wrestled forward opened fire from the ridgeline on which Grithair chan Mahsdyr stood watching.
“Move, gods damn you! Move!” Ilkathym’s sword was in his hand, somehow, and he jabbed it at the steep valley side from which that spreading thundered came. “Get your weapons and fucking follow me!”
Perhaps a half-dozen voices answered, and he snarled. He already knew how this was going to end, but he’d been a soldier for seventeen years. That was more than half his entire life, and here at the end, he discovered that he didn’t know how to be anything else.
“Follow me, boys!” he screamed and charged across the valley.
He got fifty yards before a.40 caliber bullet hit him squarely at the base of his throat.
* * *
“Mother Jambakol!”
Kilvyn Forstmir whirled towards the sudden sound of explosions and gunfire, his face gaunt with shock in the afternoon light pouring through from the far side of the portal. The main encampment was over four miles from Fort Rensar’s charred remains, but sound carried extraordinarily well in the cold, still air. He’d never heard anything like it, and he didn’t really know what he was hearing now, but he knew who had to be behind it.
How? How in the names of all the gods could Sharonians have gotten this far down-chain from Traisum so quickly? And how could they have done it without anyone spotting them?