And even if they could bring that heavier fire to bear…
“Where the hells did they all go?” he murmured.
“I beg your pardon, Sir?” Mahrkrai asked.
“Eh?” Harshu looked up, then realized he’d spoken aloud and shrugged. “Where did that first trainload of Sharonians go?” He tapped the tabletop image in front of him. “This is an entirely different train, Herak. Look-it doesn’t even have the same number of ‘locomotives’ on the front.”
“No, Sir,” Mahrkrai agreed.
“I know you and Tamdaran are right in at least one respect, Klayrman,” the two thousand said, turning his attention to the Air Force officer. “They can’t send individual sliders down those railroads of theirs the way we could, so obviously they have to turn around entire trains. And they can’t have an unlimited number of cars and locomotives out here at the arse-end of nowhere any more than we’ve got a slider line running right up to our backdoor. So it makes sense for them to have sent that lead train back up the line for another load. But where did all the men who were on it go?”
“I’m not sure they went anywhere, Sir,” Toralk replied. “They’ve got work parties out all over the place, obviously building a very substantial permanent encampment. And there’s an entire tent city over here to the southeast.” He used his own stylus to bring up the relevant imagery. “There’s more than enough tentage to cover two or three thousand men, and we still don’t have any clear idea how many men they have in one of their ‘brigades.’”
“That’s true, Sir,” Mahrkrai acknowledged. “We haven’t seen a lot of men coming and going from those tents, though.”
“And we haven’t been able to keep them under anything like continuous observation, either,” Toralk pointed out.
“I’d feel happier if we had been able to,” Harshu said sourly. “I don’t like not being able to count noses on the primary enemy force in our front.”
“There’s been one possibility playing around in the back of my mind,” Mahrkrai said thoughtfully. “Were you ever stationed in Farsh Danuth, Sir?”
“No.” Harshu looked at him. “Never wanted to be, either.” He grimaced. “I’ve been through the region a couple of times, but I was never actually stationed there, thank Graholis!”
Farsh Danuth was an ancient kingdom lying between the Farshian Sea in the west, the Tankara Gulf in the east, the Shansir Mountains in the northwest, and the Urdanha Mountains in the northeast. It was also the product of ancient Mythalan conquest across Mythal’s Stool, the triangular peninsula between the Hyrythian and Farshian Seas. As such, the kingdom had served as the buffer zone-and flashpoint-for hostility between Mythal and Ransar for centuries. Perhaps as a result, it was almost rabidly Mythalan in population, societal institutions, and attitudes, and Andarans were seldom made to feel welcome within its borders.
“Well, this portal’s up in the Hanahk Mountains west of Selkhara,” Mahrkrai said, “and there’s not a lot of grazing in the vicinity. Fort Salby’s farther east, on the edge of the Selkhara Oasis, and the grass is probably at least a little better there-it certainly is back home, at any rate, although the portal wind from Karys probably makes the local climate even worse. At any rate, what I’ve been thinking is that this is a dragoon brigade, according to all our information, and that means it has a lot of horses. And horses eat a lot. So if they aren’t planning on launching some sort of cavalry charge down the Cut, it would make sense for them to’ve pulled their horses back along the rail line to somewhere they can supplement fodder with grazing. Gods know we’re having enough trouble keeping our cavalry fed, and their horses don’t have the advantage of augmentation.”
“And if they’ve pulled the horses back,” Harshu said thoughtfully, “it would be logical to pull back the riders, as well, aside from whatever they thought they’d need to keep us from breaking through and hitting Fort Salby again.”
“It would ease the strain on local water supplies, too, Sir,” Mahrkrai pointed out.
“That’s true,” Toralk said, gazing down at the imagery before them, “and it makes a lot of sense. On the other hand, I’m beginning to wonder if they actually had as many men close enough to the front to get them here in the time window as Five Hundred Neshok’s interrogations suggested they could.”
The other two looked at him, and the Air Force officer shrugged.
“I’m not suggesting his…interrogation subjects were able to fool the verifier spells,” he said, unable to quite hide his distasteful tone, “but none of them ever had hard and fast confirmation of exactly what was coming down this railroad line of theirs to reinforce them. All they had was rumors, and gods know we’ve all heard enough wish-fulfillment rumors in our careers! Maybe the Sharonians were caught even more off-balance than we thought. More off-balance than the Sharonians between Hell’s Gate and Traisum thought they were. If so, and especially if they’re even shorter on railroad trains on this side of the Hayth water gap than we’ve been estimating, they may have sent a lot fewer men in the first echelon than we’d originally allowed for and they could be spending more time running the trains they do have back and forth.”
“I suppose that’s always possible, too,” Harshu said after a moment, pursing his lips as he considered it. “I don’t think it’s something we should count on, though. Especially since they obviously did manage to get these”-he tapped the outsized artillery pieces the Sharonians were busily digging in-“all the way up here. Neshok’s reports all indicate the Sharonians have cannon even they consider ‘heavy artillery,’ but that weapons that heavy aren’t normally attached to their maneuver formations. Especially not to their dragoons, since they don’t have levitation spells or-as Harek’s just pointed out about their cavalry-the kind of augmented draft animals we do, either. So if they can dip into their larger formations’ artillery and get it this far forward, it seems unlikely they couldn’t get infantry and cavalry forward at least as rapidly.”
“Agreed, Sir.” Toralk nodded. “And I’m not suggesting we make any plans based on an assumption that they didn’t get just as many men moved up to Fort Salby as we expected them to. On the other hand, we still haven’t gotten a recon gryphon close enough for a really good look at those big guns, either. It’s always possible they’re running a bluff-that these are actually dummy weapons the Sharonians are so busy digging in where we can see them because they haven’t been able to move up enough men to feel confident of holding a heavy attack. For all we know, they could be the sorts of things we might cobble up with camouflage spells. We haven’t seen any sign of that out of them yet, but gods only know what these Talents of theirs are capable of.”
“That’s true enough,” Harshu said even more sourly. “Of course, whether they’re really there or not, we’re still on the wrong end of an awful solid cork as far as any further advances are concerned.”