Through Fiery Trials Page 6

  It was unfortunate that His Majesty’s bureaucrats could collect such a smaller slice of graft off of contracts placed in South Harchong, but as the Grand Inquisitor had pointed out at the time, sometimes God’s service required sacrifice. In the case of the imperial bureaucracy’s pockets, that sacrifice had probably amounted to several million marks. Which had nothing at all to do with why all of the Army’s current orders were being placed with the far smaller, far less efficient, far more corrupt manufactories in North Harchong, of course.

  “How many rifles?” Blue River’s voice was barely above a whisper, and Star Rising shrugged.

  “That I don’t know,” he acknowledged. “But in fairness to North Wind Blowing and Ywahn, they have managed to substantially increase Jai-hu’s capacity. I’d be surprised if it was less than several thousand.”

  Blue River paled, and Star Rising didn’t blame him one bit if this was all coming at him cold. The thought of “several thousand” modern rifles in the hands of serfs ought to scare any aristocrat “shitless,” he reflected.

  “Langhorne,” the other baron muttered, then moved so that he, too, could look out over the crowded chamber from Star Rising’s side.

  “I hadn’t heard that,” he murmured, “but it makes sense out of something I did overhear yesterday.”

  “What?” Star Rising asked, equally quietly.

  “One of His Majesty’s gentlemen-in-waiting was having a very quiet but … heated discussion with one of North Wind Blowing’s people. I couldn’t linger to hear all of it, of course. But apparently, His Majesty thinks this would be a good time for him and the entire imperial family to pay a long overdue state visit to Yu-kwau.”

  Their eyes met, and Star Rising grimaced. Yu-kwau was almost three thousand miles from Shang-mi as a wyvern might fly. It was also in South Harchong, where there’d been none of the unrest which had begun to flicker across North Harchong.

  “North Wind Blowing’s man assured him there was no cause for alarm with Winter Glory on his way. From what you’re saying, though.…”

  “For all I know, he was absolutely right about that,” Star Rising said. “On the other hand, he might be wrong, too.”

  “My family is visiting my wife’s parents,” Blue River said. “At Zhowlin.”

  Their eyes met. Zhowlin was one of Shang-mi’s satellite summer vacation cities, thirty miles southeast of the capital on the Shang-mi–Suwhan High Road. Its city wall was rudimentary, little more than decorative, and it was surrounded by the estates of both the wealthy and the modestly well-to-do … which had no walls at all.

  “If you have relatives in Boisseau, you might want to send them on a visit there,” Star Rising said softly. “Unless you have relatives in the South, of course.”

  .III.

  Shang-mi–Jai-hu High Road, Mai-sun Forest, Tiegelkamp Province, North Harchong.

  “Can you believe this crap,” Lyangbau Saiyang snarled. The Earl of Winter Glory was not noted for his equable temper at the best of times, but his expression was savage as he thrust the message at Lord of Foot Chyang, his second in command.

  Chyang took it a bit gingerly. Unlike Winter Glory’s, Chyang’s birth barely qualified him for inclusion in the Harchongese squirearchy. His family were small landholders in Stene Province, and there were times when he was acutely aware of his humble origins. Like the times when the Earl launched one of his tirades against their superiors. Not agreeing with Winter Glory was always a bad idea, but depending on who was listening, agreeing with one of his diatribes might be an even worse one.

  The Lord of Foot unfolded the crumpled message and scanned it quickly, ignoring the totally blank expression of the mounted courier who’d delivered it. Then his nostrils flared, and he shook his head.

  This time the Earl had a point.

  “They’re only getting around to telling us this now, My Lord?” he asked, looking up with an incredulous expression.

  “You saw me open the dispatch!” Winter Glory half snapped, and Chyang nodded quickly. When the Earl was in one of his moods, rhetorical questions could go right past him.

  “I’m sorry, My Lord. I meant to say they damned well should have told us sooner.”

  “Umph.” Winter Glory scowled, but at least some of the irritation leached out of his expression. He snatched the message back and read it again, as if he hoped its contents could somehow become more palatable the second time around.

  They didn’t.

  “It’s probably the damned insurrectionists,” he growled. “Bastards’ve been burning semaphore towers, I expect. For that matter, we’ve been out of contact with the chain for the last couple of days, anyway. Can’t see crap with all these trees.”

  He waved irritably at the dense, unconsecrated forest stretching away on either hand. Aside from the high road’s relatively narrow right-of-way, they were surrounded by a dense-growing, all but impenetrable sea of cone wood and northern oil tree. In fact, the right-of-way itself was much narrower and far more badly overgrown—not just with saplings, in all too many cases—than it ought to have been. Keeping the roadbed clear, especially of the fast-growing evergreen cone wood, was a nontrivial task, and in Chyang’s opinion, this entire stretch was long overdue for another periodic logging back. For that matter, it was even farther overdue for consecration. Unfortunately, the terrain hereabout offered very little to incentivize the effort. Aside from the occasional hostel serving travelers to and from the capital, there weren’t even any villages, since there was no agricultural land to support them. For that matter, there was already more farmland than anyone had serfs to work—especially after the Jihad’s drafts had swept so many of those serfs off, never to return—and no one had the available labor to start logging off the unconsecrated trees. The local nobles were none too plump in the pocket, so they restricted themselves to the bare minimum of maintenance the Holy Writ required—and skimped even on that, if their local clergy let them get away with it—while they pinched their marks towards other ends.

  “I don’t suppose the delay’s going to matter much, anyway,” Winter Glory continued. “Not in the short term. We’re only three days from the capital now, and it doesn’t change anything about our situation. But not having Nyangzhi waiting for us when we get there.… That’s going to be a royal pain in the arse.”

  “If you’ll forgive me, My Lord, I’d call that a bit of an understatement,” Chyang said, still grappling with the news himself. “But it happened a full five-day ago. That’s what I can’t get over. They could’ve gotten a post rider to us three days ago even if every tower in the semaphore chain is down!”

  “The only thing that would surprise me would be to discover there really is someone in the capital who doesn’t have his head squarely up his arse.” Winter Glory handed the message to one of his aides. “File this piece of shit somewhere.”

  “Yes, My Lord! At once!”

  Chyang watched with a certain amusement as the aide took advantage of the opportunity to remove himself from the Earl’s presence.

  “It’s all part of the same kind of thinking that’s fucked up everything else for the last six or seven years,” Winter Glory went on, glowering at the deeply shaded high road as they rode along. “First sending every frigging rifle, artillery piece, and bayonet to that idiot Rainbow Waters just so he could lose them to the Shan-wei damned heretics. Then not dragging him home to Answer for the way he bungled the Jihad. So now everybody’s playing catch-up, trying to make up for all the time we’ve lost. And what are we armed with? Arbalests and matchlocks, that’s what we’re armed with. Except, of course, for the fifteen thousand rifles that were supposed to be waiting for us at Shang-mi. Langhorne only knows how long it’s going to take to put together another shipment that size!”

  “Agreed, My Lord,” Chyang said. He hesitated a moment, then cleared his throat. “I can’t say I’m very happy about the possibility of serfs getting their hands on that many Saint Kylmahns, either,” he said in a carefully neutral tone.r />
  “I’m not doing any handsprings of joy over it, myself,” Winter Glory growled. “On the other hand, they’re serfs, Dzhungnan. Stupid bastards probably haven’t even figured out which end the bullet comes out of yet! Even if they have, it’ll take them a while to figure out anything else about how to use them.” He shook his head. “Like I said, we’re only three days from the capital now and at least the idiots-that-be haven’t managed to lose any artillery to them yet! We’ve got plenty of time to get there, and rifles or no rifles, our men will do just fine from behind the walls with arbalests.”

  Chyang nodded, keeping his expression merely thoughtful, and hoped to hell the Earl was right about that.

  * * *

  “Smell that, Sir?” Sergeant Mangzhin Pau said suddenly.

  “Smell what?” Captain of Spears Sywangwan Zhu-chi asked, lowering the sausage he’d been gnawing on as they rode along in the cool shadows of the forest on either side of the high road.

  “Dunno, Sir,” Sergeant Pau frowned. “Smells almost like … smoke?”

  Zhu-chi sat suddenly straighter in his saddle. His platoon was point for the entire column, and if the sergeant was smelling smoke, then it was coming to them on the wind out of the west … directly into their faces.

  He looked around, and the cool shade was suddenly far less welcome than it had been.

  “Send a scout ahead,” he said.

  * * *

  Corporal Hangdau Yungdan cantered briskly along the high road. At twenty-eight, he considered himself fortunate to have avoided assignment to the Mighty Host. He’d been only twenty when the first wave of the Mighty Host was hastily conscripted, and the Emperor’s Spears had been forced to give up almost a third of their total manpower. The Spears hadn’t liked that, and they’d opted to keep their more senior and experienced personnel close to home. That meant most of the troopers Yungdan’s age had wound up in the Republic of Siddarmark, and precious few of them had come home again.

  At the moment, his good fortune in that respect was rather secondary to his thinking, because he’d come to the conclusion Sergeant Pau had been right. At first, he’d been able to tell himself the sergeant was imagining things, although he couldn’t remember the last time Sergeant Pau had allowed his imagination to run away with him. Still, he hadn’t smelled any smoke. Not at first.

  But as he’d moved ahead of the column, he’d begun to catch whiffs of something that certainly could be smoke, and now there was a fine haze of it drifting eastward, right into his face on a slowly but steadily strengthening wind. His horse knew it, too. It was snorting and tossing its head, obviously uneasy, and Yungdan reached down to pat it reassuringly on the shoulder.

  He’d have felt better if someone had been reassuring him.

  And then he rounded the bend and drew his mount to an abrupt halt.

  He sat for a moment, staring into the abruptly denser, thicker wall of smoke, and fear was a sudden, icy boulder in his belly. He looked at that arc of flame, still distant enough that he saw it like the bowels of hell through the pickets of green treetops and branches, and swallowed hard. It stretched as far as he could see on either side of the high road … and it was coming for him.

  * * *

  “Sweet Langhorne.”

  Earl Winter Glory stared at the hastily scrawled note the rider on the sweat-lathered horse had just handed him. Then he lowered it, passed it across to Lord of Foot Chyang, and turned in his saddle, staring up and down as much of the column as he could see. There were fifteen thousand troopers in that column. Along with its transport elements, it was over six miles long.

  Chyang finished reading the dispatch and looked up, his face ashen.

  “Get a courier off to Captain of Horse Tugpang!” Winter Glory snapped. “He’s to stop, turn around, and immediately begin moving east at his best possible speed. He’s authorized to abandon any of his baggage train if it slows him down, as long as he keeps the roadbed clear when he does. Then I want additional couriers to every regimental commander in the column. They’re to halt in place immediately and turn back east as soon as the formation to their east stops and begins moving that direction!”

  “Yes, My Lord! Immediately!” Chyang replied and began snapping orders of his own.

  Winter Glory left him to it. He nodded to his immediate bodyguard and started cantering east himself. He needed to get closer to what was about to become the head of his column if he was going to control it.

  At least a little of his initial panic—and that was what it had been, he acknowledged—began to ease as he considered his situation. There was no time to waste, that was certain, and the flames might very well overtake what had been his vanguard. That would be ugly. Winter Glory himself had grown up on the high northern plains of Maddox. He’d never actually seen a forest fire, but he’d seen plenty of bonfires. He knew how quickly seasoned cone wood and oil tree took fire, and he strongly doubted that green cone wood, with all of its waxy, resinous needles still attached, caught fire any more slowly … or burned with any less ferocity. For that matter, the oil trees’ pods were ripe and swollen with their fiercely combustible oil.

  There’s time, he told himself firmly. There has to be time. Maybe you’re going to lose some of the men, and a lot’s going to depend on how well the horses hold up to this when we really start to run for it. Probably have to abandon the draft dragons, for that matter. But if you can get them moving, surely you can save most of them!

  The courier to Tugpang went past him at a dead gallop, thundering along the verge of the high road, and the earl sprigged his own mount to a brisker pace.

  * * *

  “’Bout time, I guess,” Tangwyn Syngpu said, snapping shut the pocket watch Captain of Foot Giaupan had given him when he’d realized he couldn’t keep his regiment’s sergeant major from going home despite the emperor’s ban. Syngpu knew Giaupan had been torn, that a part of him had wanted to go with the sergeant with whom he’d shared so much. But the captain of foot had sworn to abide by the ban … which hadn’t kept him from giving Syngpu a lot of very sound advice. Including the need to coordinate things carefully … and keep even complicated operations as brutally simple as possible.

  Now the ex-sergeant stood in the welcome cool of the forest’s dense shade. The sky immediately above the high road was a brilliant blue canopy, dusted with distant white clouds, and there’d been no rain in five-days. The trees were dry as tinder, he thought, and shivered somewhere deep inside at his own choice of simile.

  He couldn’t smell any smoke yet, but he knew what had happened twelve miles to the west, where the only other watch they had showed the same time his did. And now it was his turn.

  “Light ’em up,” he said harshly, and Zhouhan Husan struck one of the Shan-wei’s candles on his belt buckle and lit the torch. Twenty yards away, another serf did the same thing. And twenty yards beyond him, another—and another. The chain of blazing torches spread out, racing away from the high road in either direction, and then Husan thrust his into the cone wood to the north of the high road while Syngpu did the same to the south.

  Within less than ten minutes, a wall of fire four miles long blazed directly across the high road. The wind pushed it to the east, but not strongly enough to prevent it from creeping west, as well, and the vengeful serfs who’d ignited that holocaust took to their heels, racing to the horses they’d captured from Captain of Horse Nyangzhi.

  The Shokan River was too shallow over most of its length to be navigable for anything much larger than canoes or rowboats, but it was broad, especially where it cut across the high road in the middle of the Mai-sun. It should provide an ample firebreak, once they got across it, Syngpu thought.

  And unlike Earl Winter Glory’s column, there would be no fire blazing across their path when they tried to.

  .IV.

  Zhynkau–Ti-Shan High Road, Boisseau Province, North Harchong.

  Kanzheng Gwanzhi’s right hand flew up in a sudden, imperative gesture.

  Bar
on Star Rising had been riding lost in his thoughts, but the movement of his senior armsman’s hand snatched him out of his reverie. He stiffened in the saddle, more aware than usual of his missing left hand as he drew rein. Fortunately, his mount was well trained. When he released the reins and let them fall on the horse’s neck, it stopped instantly and its ears pricked as it waited for him to guide it by the pressure of knees and heels alone.

  Most Harchongese warhorses had received similar training, but there was a reason South Wind had been particularly well schooled. It left the baron’s remaining hand free for the double-barreled pistols in his saddle holsters.

  Gwanzhi glanced at the much younger man riding to Star Rising’s right, who looked a great deal like the armsman. Now Gwanzhi flicked a gesture that sent his son, Kanzheng, still farther to the right and twenty yards behind Star Rising. The third member of the baron’s personal guard dropped back and to the left, and Gwanzhi touched a heel to his own horse and moved to Star Rising’s side.

  “What?” the baron asked quietly.

  “Not sure, My Lord,” Gwanzhi replied without a flicker of expression. The armsman took particular pride in his unflappable demeanor. That didn’t mean there was anything slow about his mental processes, as Star Rising knew better than most. “But I heard something from behind,” he added.