The Inner Circle sat in silence as High Priest Vroxhan laid the semaphore message aside. He pressed it flat with his fingers, then tucked his hands into the sleeves of his robe, hugging himself against a chill which had nothing to do with the cool night, and met their gaze. Even Bishop Corada was white-faced, and Frenaur sagged about his bones.
Lord Rokas was dead; barely forty thousand of the Host had escaped, less than half of them with weapons; and High-Captain Ortak had the Host’s rearguard working with frantic speed to dig in further down the Keldark Valley. Ortak’s report was short of details, yet one thing was clear. The Host hadn’t been beaten. It hadn’t even been routed. It had been destroyed.
“There you have it, Brothers,” Vroxhan said. “We’ve failed to crush the heresy, and surely the heretics will soon counterattack.” He glanced at High-Captain—no, Lord Marshal—Surak, and the man who had just become the Guard’s senior officer looked back with stony eyes. “Exactly how bad is the situation, Lord Marshal?”
Surak winced at his new title, then squared his shoulders.
“Even with Ortak’s survivors, we have barely seventy thousand men in all of Keldark. I don’t yet know how many men the heretics deployed, but from the casualties we’ve suffered, they must have many more than that. I would have said they could never have raised and armed them, even with demonic aid, yet that they must have is evident from the result. I’ve already ordered every pike in Keldark forward to Ortak, but I fear they can do little more than slow the heretics. They can’t stop them if they keep coming.”
A soft sigh ran around the table, but Vroxhan looked up sternly, and it faded. Surak continued in a harsh voice.
“With Your Holiness’ permission, I will order Ortak to retire on Erastor until more men—and weapons—can reach him. He can fight delaying actions, but if he stands, the heretics will surely overwhelm him.”
“Wait,” Corada objected. “Did not Lord Rokas say that an attacker needed twice or thrice a defender’s numbers?”
Surak looked to Vroxhan, who nodded for him to answer.
“He did, and he was right, Your Grace, but those calculations are for battles in which neither side has demonic aid.”
“Are you suggesting God’s power is less than that of demons?”
Surak was no coward, but he fought an urge to wipe his forehead.
“No, Your Grace,” he replied carefully. “I think it plain the demons did aid the heretics, and until I have Ortak’s detailed report I can’t say how they did so, but that isn’t what I meant. Consider, please, Your Grace. Our men have been defeated—” that pallid understatement twisted his mouth like sour wine “—and they know it. They’ve lost many of their weapons. Ortak may have forty thousand men, but barely twenty thousand are armed, and their morale is—must be—shaken. The heretics have all the weapons abandoned on the field to swell their original strength, and demons or no, they know they won. Their morale will be strengthened even as ours is weakened.”
He paused and raised his empty hands, palms uppermost.
“If I order Ortak to stand, he will. And as surely as he does, he’ll be destroyed, Your Grace. We must withdraw, using the strength we still possess to slow the enemy until fresh strength can be sent to join it.”
“But by your estimate, Lord Marshal,” Vroxhan said, “we lack the numbers to meet the heretics on equal terms.” The high priest’s voice was firm, but anxiety burned in its depths.
“We do, Holiness,” Surak replied, “but I believe we have sufficient to hold at least the eastern end of the Keldark Valley. I would prefer to do just that and open a new offensive from the west, were our strength in Cherist and Thirgan great enough. It isn’t, however, so we must fight them here. I realize that it was the Inner Circle’s desire to defeat this threat solely with our own troops, Holiness, yet that’s no longer possible either. Our main field army has, for all intents and purposes, been destroyed, not merely defeated, and I fear we must summon the secular armies of the east to Holy War. Were all their numbers gathered into a single new Host under the Temple’s banner, they would—they must—suffice for victory … but only if we can hold the heretics in the mountains until they’ve mustered. For that reason, if no other, Ortak must be ordered to delay the enemy.”
“I see.” Vroxhan sighed. “Very well, Lord Marshal, let it be as you direct. Send your orders, and the Circle will summon the princes.” Surak stooped to kiss the hem of the high priest’s robe and withdrew, his urgency evident in his speed, and Vroxhan looked about the table once more.
“And as for us, Brothers, I ask you all to join me in the Sanctum that we may pray for deliverance from the ungodly.”
Chapter Thirty
Sean MacIntyre stood with Sandy and frowned down at the relief map. Tibold and a dozen other officers stood around respectfully, watching him and “the Angel Sandy” study the map, and the absolute confidence in their eyes made him want to scream at them.
The Battle of Yortown lay one of the local “five-days” in the past. The Angels’ Army had advanced a hundred and thirty kilometers in that time, but now High-Captain Ortak’s entrenched position lay squarely in its path, and try as he might, Sean saw no way around it. In fact, he’d come to the conclusion Tibold had offered from the first: the only way around was through, and that was the reason for his frown.
Sean’s army had every advantage in an open field battle. The Yortown loot had included twenty-six thousand joharns, enough for Sean to convert all fifty-eight thousand of his men into musketeers and send several thousand to the force covering the Thirgan Gap in the west to boot, and Brashan had shifted Israel to the mountains directly above Yortown to decrease cutter transit time to the battleship. The Narhani’s machine shop modules had increased their modification rate to forty-five hundred rifles (with bayonet rings) a night, and the Malagoran gunsmiths were adding almost a thousand a day more on their own, now that “the angels” had taught them about rifling benches. Unfortunately, over half Sean’s army had been trained as pikemen, and the new men were still learning which end the bullet came out of.
Even so, his troops were fleeter of foot and had incomparably more firepower than any other Pardalian army. The new, standardized rifle regiments he and Tibold had organized could kill their enemies from five or six times smoothbore range, and the absence of polearms made them far more mobile. Even the best pikemen were less than nimble trailing five-meter pikes, and his rifle-armed infantry could dance rings around the Guard’s ponderous phalanxes. Coupled with its higher rate of fire, the Angels’ Army could cut four or five times its own number to pieces in a mobile engagement.
Unhappily, High-Captain Ortak knew it. He was well supplied with artillery, since Lord Marshal Rokas had known the cramped terrain at Yortown would reduce his guns’ efficiency and left many of them with his rearguard, and reinforcements had come forward, but less than half his roughly eighty thousand men were actually armed. Less than twelve thousand were musketeers, and he dared not face the Angels’ Army in the open. But short of arms or not, his men still outnumbered Sean’s by almost forty percent, and all those unarmed men had been busy with mattocks. The earthworks he’d thrown up at Erastor closed the Keldark Valley north of the Mortan, and he clearly had no intention of venturing beyond them. Nor could any army go around them. The Mortan was unfordable for over ninety kilometers upstream or down from Erastor, and the terrain south of the river was so boggy not even nioharqs could drag artillery or wagons through it.