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Chapter Twenty-Nine
"Aruncas!" Tarnal Garsal, Windlord Garsal, muttered.
The second lord of horse stood in Sunlord Markan's command post, looking back at the smokestreaming PAAF fort behind them, and he had ample reason to invoke the Uromathian god of war. Both cavalry officers, like Rof chan Skrithik, were veterans of long service. And, like chan Skrithik, neither of them had ever seen or imagined anything like this.
Actually, Garsal found the smoke and flames almost comforting in their normality. At least they were much less disconcerting than the enormous beast—the dragon, he told himself, using the Ternathian Crown Prince's terminology as he looked back at it—which had crashed to earth less than sixty yards from the CP. It loomed like a scaly mountain of broken bone and flesh where it had landed, crushing a dozen of Garsal's cavalry troopers in its death plunge.
"Aruncas, indeed," a voice said at Garsal's shoulder.
He turned his head and saw Sunlord Markan gazing out across the sandbags at the same sight. The first lord of horse was the second ranking officer of the Salby garrison, which had made him the proper choice to command the infantry and artillery positions outside the fort itself. He didn't exactly look shaken ... but his expression came far closer to that than anything Garsal had ever seen from him before.
"I didn't really believe him, you know," Garsal said. Markan glanced at him and raised one eyebrow. "I suppose I didn't want to believe him," Garsal admitted, and this time Markan snorted.
"I imagine most of us would have preferred not to," the sunlord said after a moment. "It's like something out of a child's fairytale about monsters, ogres, and magic spells."
Garsal nodded, and Markan turned his eyes back to the monstrous, broken-winged carcass sprawled across the mangled bodies of his men.
There was another reason Garsal hadn't wanted to believe Prince Janaki, the sunlord thought. Another reason he hadn't wanted to, for that matter.
Markan had his own very private reservations about his Emperor, but Chava Busar was still his Emperor, and—up to this moment, at least—Markan had found himself forced to agree with Emperor Chava on at least one point: far too many people in Sharona were reacting with far too much panic to the reports from the frontiers.
Stories about "magic" simply didn't belong in the everyday world of hardheaded, practical men. Oh, no one had questioned the fact that the Arcanans were actually there, or that they had massacred the Chalgyn Consortium survey crew with frighteningly unknown weapons. But Hell's Gate was forty-eight thousand miles from Sharona, and hard on the news of the massacre had come the word that less than four hundred men had taken the swamp portal away from the enemy with ludicrous ease. Sharonian weapons had been clearly and obviously superior to anything they had yet faced, and nothing else the Arcanans had demonstrated since that short, brutal battle had been especially terrifying. Surely not enough to justify the almost hysterical response of certain of Sharona's political leaders!
Whatever happened out on the distant frontier, there was no real chance of an enemy successfully fighting his way through the portals and all of the wearisome miles between them to actually reach Sharona. Even assuming that all of those arguing in favor of some sort of worldwide—hells, multiversewide—empire were genuinely sincere in their motivations and not simply seeking to manipulate the political equation for their own advantage (which seemed unlikely, to say the least), it would have been foolish to allow oneself to be caught up in the hysteria.
Now, smelling the smoke from Fort Salby, looking at the huge, broken body of a genuine dragon while he awaited the second assault from a force which had advanced four thousand miles in less than two weeks, Jukan Darshu, Sunlord Markan, knew those "hysterical" leaders had been right all along. If the Arcanans had dragons that breathed fire and spat lightning, if they could cover eight percent of the total distance to Sharona in only two weeks, then the gods alone knew what else they might have or be able to do. It was entirely possible that they could fight their way clear to Sharona, after all ... and that Zindel of Ternathia and Ro
Firsoma! he thought. If the Crown Prince Saw this in a Glimpse, what has his father Seen?
He didn't much care for that question, for a lot of reasons.
Of course you don't. You're a Uromathian, and Uromathians don't like Ternathians, do they? But if the Arcanans have capabilities like this, then maybe the Conclave was right. Maybe we can't afford to be Uromathians or Ternathians any longer ... even if it does mean putting another crown on Zindel chan Calirath's head.
"They're coming back."
Regiment-Captain chan Skrithik twitched as Janaki spoke for the first time in at least half an hour.
"Your Highness?"
"They're coming back," Janaki repeated in that same otherworldly tone. "They're using their dragons to circle around the other aspect of the portal in Karys. Then they're going to use the western aspect in Traisum and swing wide, try to keep us from seeing them while they put cavalry on the ground."
"Cavalry? In the open against dug-in infantry and artillery?" Chan Skrithik couldn't believe what he was hearing.
"Yes," Janaki said. He turned those daunting eyes on the regiment-captain. "It's not going to be that easy. They can put them on the ground east of us and avoid most of our covering positions, and their cavalry is a lot faster than ours. And they've got something else. Something to cover them. I can't quite See it yet. And they're loading up other dragons with infantry. They'll be coming at us, too, and I think they're going to use those eagle-lions this time, as well."
Chan Skrithik's jaw tightened. He would have been totally confident of his entrenched infantry's ability to deal with any Sharonian cavalry attack. But as Janaki had just reminded him, he wasn't dealing with Sharonians ... as their ability to avoid his entrenchments demonstrated.
"Can you See how they'll come at us, Your Highness?" he asked.
"Not yet," Janaki replied, and a hint of frustration shadowed his voice even through its detachment.
"There are still too many possibilities. They're coming together ... focusing. But they aren't there yet."
"Can you See where they'll land their cavalry?" Chan Skrithik asked, opening his map case.
"Here or here." Janaki's forefinger stabbed the map, and chan Skrithik looked up at Senior-Armsman Isia.
"Message for Company-Captain Mesaion. Give him these coordinates." Chan Skrithik read them off from the map grid. "Tell the Company-Captain I want chan Forcal to Watch both of them. And I want the howitzers ready to engage."
"Yes, Sir."
The Flicker had been writing quickly while the regiment-captain spoke. Now he read back his shorthand notations. Chan Skrithik nodded approval, and Isia Flicked the message canister to Mesaion's Flicker.
The artillerist's acknowledgment appeared on the parapet beside chan Skrithik less than two minutes later.
Commander of Fifty Delthyr Fahrlo was still trying to come to grips with what had happened to the initial attack as he and Deathclaw led the line of transport dragons out of the portal's western aspect.
The maneuver wouldn't have been very practical without dragons. The nature of the portals between universes meant that any traveler from Karys found himself confronting the same sort of enormous cliffs no matter which way he passed through the portal, but the westernmost cliffs were quite a bit higher than those to the east. Wind erosion had softened and grooved the tops of those sheer cliffs until the pressures between the two sides of the portals had equalized, but the palisade of stone remained steeply and starkly unscalable.
Facing east into Traisum, from the opposite side of the portal, the cliffs were much shallower, and the wind screaming down the slopes beyond the cliffs edges had carved deep ravines. The Sharonian construction engineers had taken advantage of that when they cut their road and "railroad" routes. As far as Fahrlo could see, they hadn't had very much choice about that, but the Expeditionary Force did, and Two Thousand Harshu and Thousand Toralk had decided to take advantage of that fact.
Too bad they didn't take advantage of it before, Fahrlo couldn't help thinking bitterly, even though he knew it was unfair. Nobody could have predicted what had happened to his fellow battle dragon pilots and their mounts before they'd actually seen it. He knew that. But he also knew that somehow he, a mere commander of fifty, had become the senior battle dragon pilot of the entire First Provisional Talon.
Of course, I'm a "commander of fifty" with only three dragons to command.
He grimaced behind his helmet visor at the thought, then shook his head. He had other things to be concentrating on at the moment.
"The dragons are landing at the second location, Sir," Chief-Armsman chan Forcal told Company- Captain Mesaion.
"Too bad, Mesaion grunted, then turned to his own Flicker. "Inform Regiment-Captain chan Skrithik that the enemy is landing at the second location and that we can't bring it under fire."
"Yes, Sir."
"Damn it," chan Skrithik muttered as Isia read him Mesaion's terse dispatch.
He'd been afraid of that when Janaki indicated the landing areas on the map. The one in question would have been out of range for the mortars, anyway, although the howitzers had the reach. He doubted these Arcanan bastards had any way of knowing that, but they'd lucked out and chosen a landing site in the dead ground beyond a steep, intervening ridgeline.
"Tell Company-Captain Mesaion I want chan Forcal to keep them under observation. Let me know the instant they begin to move out."
"Yes, Sir."
"Five Hundred Urlan's in position, Sir," the hummer-handler a
"Good." Harshu turned to Toralk. "I suppose that means it's time, Klayrman."
"Yes, Sir. It is." Toralk nodded, then looked at the hummer handler. "Send Hundred Kormas the release order, Senior Sword."