At the Sign of Triumph (Safehold)

.VIII.

Merlin Athrawes’ Chamber,

The Charisian Embassy,

Siddarmark City

“Got a minute, Merlin?”

Merlin Athrawes looked up from the revolver he’d been carefully cleaning and oiling.

Sandrah Lywys had finally gotten her new “smokeless” powder—they’d actually gone ahead and called it cordite, since it was extruded in narrow rods that looked exactly like the Old Earth propellant of the same name—into production. The field armies had several million rounds of old-fashioned black powder ammunition to use up, but the Imperial Guard had already switched completely to the new propellant. In addition to virtually no smoke, it produced far less fouling than gunpowder had, but the ICA’s fulminating primers still left a corrosive residue which could damage a weapon if it wasn’t promptly cleaned after firing, and Merlin had spent over an hour at the range this afternoon, putting several hundred rounds downrange. Not because a PICA’s programmable muscle memory needed the practice, but because he’d discovered how much he enjoyed it. And because he’d figured he was due the downtime. He’d been back from Cherayth for barely a five-day, and this was the first opportunity to do something remotely like relaxing that had come his way.

“I’m not especially busy right this minute, if you don’t mind my going ahead and finishing this—” he told the image projected across his vision as he waved the oil-soaked swab in his hand “—while we talk. Nynian and I are having dinner tonight, and I want to grab a shower first. I’d really rather not smell like I’ve been bathing in gun oil when we sit down to eat.”

“Dinner with Nynian, is it?” Nahrmahn Baytz murmured with a smile. Merlin gave him a moderate glare, and the dead, rotund little Emeraldian’s expression straightened quickly. “Well, I don’t see any reason you shouldn’t go on playing with your toys,” he said more briskly. “I’ve just had a thought about Rainbow Waters and Maigwair’s troop deployments, though.”

“Oh?” Merlin cocked his head. “What sort of thought would that be?”

“Well, as I understand Kynt and Eastshare’s plans for this summer, they’d really like to be able to hook around an open flank, right?”

“Except for the minor fact that there’s not going to be an open flank, yes, they certainly would,” Merlin agreed a bit sourly.

By all rights, there should have been open flanks, he reflected. The Church’s defensive front stretched from Hsing-wu’s Passage in the north all the way south to the Bay of Bess and the northern border of Dohlar. That was considerably better than two thousand miles—more than eight hundred miles farther than the Russian Front in 1942, when it had stretched all the way from Murmansk to the Caucasus Mountains. No one could hold a contiguous front line that long. Even if the Church met its full three-million-man target, Rainbow Waters and Maigwair would have less than fifteen hundred men per mile of front, and that was assuming the front was a straight line, unaffected by any terrain features, which it most definitely was not.

Some of those terrain features—like the Snake Mountains and the Black Wyvern Mountains on the western borders of Cliff Peak and Westmarch—would actually help economize on manpower, of course. Others would consume it voraciously, however, so that was pretty much a wash. Still, there was plenty of relatively firm, flat (or at least firmer and flatter) ground out there.

What there wasn’t was an intact road net and internal combustion engines. Dragons bestowed a degree of mobility and flexibility on Safeholdian armies for which any preindustrial Old Terran general would cheerfully have sold his firstborn child, but they weren’t magic. And the dirt roads which served local communities once one got off the magnificent high roads didn’t make things a lot better. The farther one got from canals or navigable rivers, the harder it became to keep an army supplied, and there was damn-all in the way of forage for an army trying to live off the land in western Siddarmark. The Sword of Schueler had been a huge head start towards making sure of that, and Rainbow Waters had spent the last several months moving every remaining civilian farmer within two hundred miles of his front line still farther west. There would be no crops, no livestock, to support an attacking army anywhere in that zone.

And because that was true, the Allies had very little choice about their axes of advance. They could ring up local tactical variations, but the waterways, the high roads, the mountain passes, the forest paths they’d have to follow were easy to predict, and Rainbow Waters intended to make them pay to break his frontier

He clearly recognized that the Allies’ primary strategic objective in the upcoming campaign. Destroying or crippling the Mighty Host, the Church’s single truly formidable field force, would give them the keys to the Temple Lands, and he knew it.

That was the true reason he’d rethought his dispositions so carefully, just as it was the reason he’d pulled Silken Hills so far back north. He was far more prepared to risk the loss of Western Cliff Peak and the Duchy of Farlas—even the Princedom of Jhurlahnk—than to expose his own right flank in western Westmarch or open the door to Sardahn … and a direct line of advance to the Holy Langhorne Canal in Usher. He’d also made careful plans to demolish roads, bridges, and canal locks in his wake whenever and wherever he was forced to give ground. The ICA’s mounted infantry would provide commanders like Eastshare and Green Valley with exploitable opportunities despite anything he could do, but there was no point pretending their flexibility wasn’t going to be straitjacketed by the Harchongian’s carefully thought out deployments.

“I know Rainbow Waters isn’t going to leave any open flanks,” Nahrmahn said, “but what if we could convince him and Maigwair to weaken the Northern Host’s right flank?”

“How far to his right?” Merlin asked, frowning thoughtfully as he consulted his mental map of the front, and Nahrmahn’s computer-generated image shrugged.

“I’m not the military man Kynt or Cayleb are, so I can’t say exactly how Maigwair and Rainbow Waters would react to what I have in mind. But what I think we might be able to do, if we manage it properly, is to convince them to move Silken Hills’ entire force several hundred miles back to the south and fill the gap with brand-new Army of God formations.”

“You think you’ve come up with a way to convince them to hand some or all of Silken Hills’ area of responsibility over to Teagmahn and the Army of Tanshar?” Merlin couldn’t quite keep the skepticism out of his voice, but Nahrmahn only smiled like a cat-lizard with a brand-new bowl of cream.

“I think I may have come up with a way to prompt them to at least consider it,” he said. “A lot depends on how well Earl Hanth continues to do, of course, and even more of it depends on the proper … misdirection. Which, I have to admit, makes it especially attractive to me, since the Group of Four’s managed to misdirect us a time or two. I’d rather enjoy turning the tables on them that way.”

“I sort of thought that was what Zhapyth Slaytyr and I did to the Army of Shiloh,” Merlin pointed out mildly.

“Yes, but that was so … so crude.” Nahrmahn lifted his nose with an audible sniff. “That was simply a case of taking an opportunity chance presented, not one that you’d generated on your own! Effective and neatly done, I’ll grant, but so reactionary, without the flair of your truly despicable and underhanded intriguer. Besides, you took unfair advantage of your ability to play chameleon. My idea is far more elegant and doesn’t depend on any high-tech chicanery.”

“‘High-tech chicanery,’ is it? And I suppose the fact that you’re even here to present your ‘elegant plan’ has nothing at all to do with high-tech or chicanery?”

“Well, perhaps, in the broadest sense,” Nahrmahn’s virtual personality conceded.

“All right.” Merlin shook his head with a chuckle. “Go ahead and dazzle me with this elegance of yours.”

“Well,” Nahrmahn said rather more seriously, “the first thing we’ll need to make this work is to bring Breyt Bahskym in on it. We’ll need to send him some bogus orders, and he’s going to have to arrange some artistic leaks of information. I expect you or Nimue can provide a seijin or two to help with the necessary leakage?”

“As long as we can keep straight who’s leaking what to whom,” Merlin said dryly. “We’ve got quite a lot of irons in the fire in that regard already, you know.” He shrugged. “On the other hand, I don’t suppose one or two more will make it any worse!”

“In that case, we also need to get Nynian involved in this, because—”