“I fear Bishop Merkyl’s age and gout made it impractical for him to accompany me on a journey which must be made in such haste, Your Eminence. We did, however, discuss these points at some length before I departed from Lake City, and he expressed his agreement with my intentions. Indeed,” he held out a hand to his nephew, who opened his briefcase and handed him a document several pages thick, “the Bishop was good enough to send along his own appreciation of the situation.”
The earl extended the document to Sainthavo, whose expression could have soured all the milk within a hundred miles as he took it.
“In the meantime, Your Eminence,” Rainbow Waters continued, “I think—”
He broke off, eyebrow rising, as a member of his staff appeared in the compartment entrance.
“Yes, Giyangzhi?” he said.
“I’m afraid an urgent dispatch has just arrived, My Lord.”
There was something odd about the officer’s voice and his expression was taut as he extended a single sheet of paper. Rainbow Waters accepted it and his eyes ran over the tersely worded dispatch. They seemed to widen for a moment, then he handed the message to his nephew and looked at the two archbishops.
“Your Eminences, I fear the situation on the northern front has just been … simplified,” he said.
* * *
Kynt Clareyk, Baron Green Valley, rode briskly down the broad, deserted avenue through a windblown drift of cinders and ash, surrounded by an entire watchful company of mounted infantry. An inferno roared all along the lakefront, a solid wall of fire that stretched for miles as it consumed warehouses packed with sufficient supplies for a million men for at least three months in a roiling torrent of flame and dense, choking black smoke.
He felt a profound sense of satisfaction as he looked around at the prize his army had taken, but he wished the Earl of Crystal Lake had been just a bit less decisive. Greedy of him, he knew, but he’d hoped the earl would find it difficult to cope with the sheer scope and surprise of Ahrtymys Ohanlyn’s new bombardment plan. Unfortunatey, Rainbow Waters had chosen what amounted to his deputy commander because he trusted that deputy’s capabilities, and the earl was an excellent judge of men. Mahzwang Lynku might be seventy-nine years old, and he might be increasingly frail physically, but age had done nothing to dull his quick intelligence and, despite his frailty, he had more energy than many officers who were two-thirds his age.
He’d needed both those qualities—badly—over the last few days. It was simply the Allies’ misfortune that he had them.
The arrival of twenty thousand tons of shells filled with Sahndrah Lywys’ Composition D had provided Ohanlyn’s gunners with an entirely new level of lethality. The new filler was both much safer to handle and twice as powerful, on a pound-for-pound basis, as black powder. It was also much denser, so twice the weight could be poured into the same shell cavity. That made a shell filled with it four times as destructive as one filled with black powder … and that meant the new 8- and 10-inch shells, in particular, had just become utterly devastating.
While the new shells were being distributed to his batteries, Ohanlyn had used the Balloon Corps to map the deployments of the three Harchongese bands holding the twisty sixty-seven miles of the Tairyn River line between the Great Tarikah Forest and East Wing Lake. There’d been close to ninety thousand men in those bands, and Lord of Foot Crystal Lake had put sixty thousand of them into the actual trenches while he held the other thirty thousand in reserve behind them, beyond even Charisian artillery’s effective range and ready to counter attack any fresh breakthrough. That hadn’t counted the battered bands refitting their divisions in Lake City itself, of course.
Unfortunately for the Mighty Host, Green Valley hadn’t had to attack the entire front. Instead, he’d chosen a ten mile segment of it for which the St. Ahgnista Band was responsible, five miles south of the lake, and Ohanlyn had deployed almost five hundred medium and heavy angle-guns and a hundred and twenty rocket batteries against it. That was a heavier density of artillery than in the vast majority of attacks in Old Terra’s World War One, and unlike the armies who’d faced one another on the Western Front in 1916 or 1917, the Mighty Host, with no balloons of its own, had been totally unable to keep track of Charisian movements beyond two or three miles—if that—of their own front lines. They hadn’t had a clue that Ohanlyn’s batteries were in motion as he assembled his sledgehammer … until that hammer came down.
The artillery general had spent two full five-days on his preparations while Green Valley held his infantry south of the lake in place, resting his assault brigades and continuing to pound away at the shrinking Vekhair pocket with his right. It was remarkable how ineffective Hainryk Klymynt’s artillery had been at Vekhair, but his showy bombardments—with old-style shells—had kept even someone as sharp as Crystal Lake looking in that direction while Ohanlyn and Green Valley’s brigade commanders made their preparations. Ohanlyn had pre-registered all of his heavy batteries, but he’d done it one battery—indeed, one gun in each battery—at a time, and he’d been careful not to use any of the new ammunition while he was about it.
And then, at 11:20 in the morning, when the majority of the Tairyn River Line’s men were sitting down to lunch, Ohanlyn had unleashed a savage, howling hurricane of a bombardment. The Mighty Host had experienced heavier bombardments than anyone else in the entire history of Safehold … but not even they had yet experienced anything like this. The sheer, stupendous weight of shells was beyond belief, and the rocket bombardment had laid a solid carpet of high explosives across the defenders’ front lines. Not only that, but each launcher had been provided with three reloads, and all four of them were launched within the space of barely an hour while the aerial observers directed the heavy guns’ fire with deadly accuracy.
And then the bombardment ceased.
It didn’t slow, didn’t taper off. It simply stopped. Every single gun ceased fire in the same minute … and when they did, the assault brigades stormed forward with their shotguns, their flamethrowers, and their satchel charges. Ohanlyn “gun dogs” had reopened fire, switching their attention to known Harchongese artillery positions that might have interfered with the attack, smothering them in a blanket of shells—using the older, black powder-filled projectiles—which silenced them completely.
The defenders had been too stunned, too mentally devastated by the suddenness of the holocaust—and by how rapidly the attack had followed on that holocaust’s heels—to offer anything like effective resistance. Green Valley’s lead assault companies had flowed through the wrecked Harchongese positions like the sea, bypassing the handful of points at which defenders were still capable of fighting back, leaving the follow-up echelons to deal with the holdouts. They’d cut completely through the two-mile-deep fortified zone in barely two hours, and in those two hours the St. Ahgnista Band had simply ceased to exist as an organized formation. Almost a quarter of the St. Jyrohm Band, on St. Ahgnista’s left, was wiped out along with it, and what remained of St. Jyrohm’s forward deployed regiments were pinned between the Charisians who were suddenly in their rear and the lake. Green Valley didn’t bother to storm that portion of the front. There’d been no need; the troops trapped in those fortifications couldn’t withdraw, and he had no intention of losing any lives assaulting them.
Earl Crystal Lake, with only an incomplete appreciation of the scale of the disaster, did what any determined, intelligent commander would have done: he threw in a heavy counterattack from his reserve. But that counterattack ran into a devastating curtain of artillery, brought down upon it by the Balloon Corps’ now highly experienced observers. It recoiled and fell back hastily—the only thing it could possibly have done under the circumstances—and by nightfall, the Army of Tarikah’s spearhead had advanced fifteen miles beyond its start point and started digging foxholes of its own while the mortars dug in behind it.