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He straightened and opened his eyes. One thing was certain, whatever Terrahk did, he reminded himself. Before he and Sean could get back into contact, they had to take Erastor, and he shoved up out of his chair. There was just enough light left for him and Ithun to make a last recon of Ortak's lines before darkness fell, and if it turned out that they had to storm those entrenchments to save Sean's posterior, he wanted all of his officers to know everything they could about their target.
More rain swept up the Keldark Valley, and High-Captain Ortak glared sourly at the clouds. The valley was always damp, of course. It was the only real opening in the Shalokar Range, and wet air from the east poured through it like a fu
He growled a soft curse, then shrugged. Rain was his friend, not the heretics'. Their musketeers outnumbered his tremendously, and if God was kind enough to soak their priming powder for them, Ortak had no intention of complaining. Let them come in and take him on with cold steel!
"How long is this going to last?" Sean asked fretfully.
He and Sandy stood fifty meters from the nearest Malagoran and conferred over their coms with Brashan.
"At least another two days," the Narhani said soberly. He sat alone on Israel's command deck, and his long-snouted, saurian face was grave. "I am sorry, Sean. We thought—"
"Not your fault," Sean interrupted. "We all knew it was coming. We just expected it to hold off longer, and then we lost all that time in the swamps. Our window should have been big enough, Twinkle Hooves."
"True, but it's not only coming in faster, it's going to rain harder than we'd predicted." The Narhani sounded worried. Sean was less than one day's march from Erastor, and the rain—only a drizzle now—would be a downpour by evening. What that would do to flintlock rifles hardly bore thinking on.
"Can we hold off till it clears?" Sandy gazed up at Sean, and her voice was anxious.
" 'Fraid not." Sean sighed. "Ortak expects his 'reinforcements' by nightfall. If we suddenly stop moving, he's going to wonder why and send someone to find out. And if he does that—" He shrugged.
"But you can't fight him without your rifles!" Sandy protested. "You don't have any pikes at all!"
"No, but we do still have surprise."
"Surprise! Are you out of your mind?! There are eighty thousand men up there, Sean! There's no way you can take their position away from them before they figure out what's happening!"
"Maybe yes, and maybe no," Sean said stubbornly. "Don't forget the confusion factor. The rain's going to cut visibility. We should be able to get a lot closer before they figure out we aren't really Guardsmen, and there's a good chance they'll panic when their 'reinforcements' suddenly attack them. They don't have the kind of communication net a modern army would have, either. It's going to be mighty hard for them to get themselves sorted out when they have to rely on messengers to carry orders."
"You're crazy!" she hissed. "Tamman, Harry—tell him!"
"I think Sandy's right, Sean," Harriet said quietly. "It's too risky. Besides, even if he does figure out what's happening, Terrahk's already falling back on Baricon. Wait till the rain stops. Ortak's not going anywhere, and maybe he'll surrender when he realizes he's trapped between you and Tam."
"Wrong answer, Harry," Tamman put in unhappily. "Ortak's not the surrendering kind, or he wouldn't have stopped at Erastor."
"What else can he do?" Harriet demanded hotly.
"He can come out after us," Sean answered. "He knows as well as we do that it's our rifles that give us the edge. You think he wouldn't take his chances on hitting us in the open if the rain knocks them out of the equation?"
Sandy started to snap back, then stopped and bit her lip. She hugged herself and turned her back on Sean for a long, taut moment, then sighed.
"No," she said finally, her voice low. "That's exactly what he'll do if he figures out what's happening."
"You got it," Sean said, equally quietly, and kicked his toe into the mud beside the raised roadbed. "Any way you cut it, we've got to carry through with my marvelous plan."
Chapter Thirty-Three
"All right, boys—you heard Lord Sean. Now let's go kick the bastards' asses!"
The officers of the First Brigade growled in agreement, and Folmak Folmakson gri
But it wasn't. Folmak settled into the saddle and checked all four pistols before he tucked them away in his boots and under his captured Guard cloak. The rain was falling harder, as Lord Sean had warned, and he'd ordered his sergeants to check each individual pan to be sure it was securely shut until it was needed. They were still going to have an appalling number of misfires, but he'd done all he could to minimize them.
He put away the last pistol and looked over his shoulder for the signal to advance. Lord Sean stood surrounded by aides, speaking quietly and urgently to Tibold, hands moving in quick, incisive gestures, and Folmak remembered his look of surprise when the men had cheered his orders.
Folmak hadn't been surprised, but Lord Sean had actually apologized to them, as if it were his fault they couldn't just stand around and wait till the rain stopped. That sort of concern made the army love Lord Sean, but it knew what it was about. Especially Folmak's men. His was the First Brigade, already called "the Old Brigade," composed of men who'd followed Father Stomald from the very begi
The regimental pipers formed in the intervals in the brigade's column, and Lord Sean nodded to his aides. They spurred up and down the entire length of the corps, and Folmak waved to his unit commanders.
"Move out!" he barked, and the Angels' Army slogged through blowing sheets of rain towards Erastor.
Sean watched his men move forward and tried to look confident. Every man in Folmak's brigade had been issued a Guard cloak, and his vanguard looked as much like Terrahk's relief force as he could make them, but the rest of his men wore Malagoran ponchos. One look at them would tell the dullest picket what they were. The rain wasn't falling as hard as he'd feared—yet—but it was getting worse, and only First Brigade marched with slung weapons. The rest of his men carried their bayoneted rifles under their arms like hunters to shield the priming with their bodies and ponchos and keep rain from ru