Nine
Gaderion had begun life as a timber-built blockhouse on a stream-girt spur of the Thurian mountains. The Fimbrians had stationed troops there to police the passage of the Torrin Gap and levy tolls on the caravans that passed through from west to east, or east to west. When their empire fell apart the station was abandoned, and the only relic left of their presence was the fine road which they had constructed to speed the passage of their armies.
The Torunnans had built a series of staging posts in the gap, and around these had grown up a straggling network of taverns and livery stables which catered for travellers. But these had withered away over the years, first of all in the retrenchment which had followed the crisis of the Merduk Wars, and then in the years after the Schism, when trade between Torunna and Almark had all but died out.
More recently, a Merduk army had begun work on a fortress in the gap, before suffering defeat in the Battle of Berrona. King Corfe, in the years following Armagedir, had had the entire region surveyed, and at the point where the road was pinched in a narrow valley between the buttresses of the two mountain chains, he had had a hilltop spur levelled, and on its summit had constructed a large fortress complex which in size at least would come to rival long-lost Ormann Dyke. In the subsequent years the defences had been extended for almost half a league, to command the entire pass, and Gaderion now consisted of three separate fortifications, all connected by massive curtain walls.
To the south-east was the donjon on its steep spur of black rock. This was a squat citadel with walls fully fifty feet thick to withstand siege guns. There was a spring within its perimeter, and below it bomb proofs had been hewn out of the living gutiock to house a fair-sized army, and enough supplies to sustain them for at least a year. Here also were the administrative offices of the garrison, and the living quarters of the commanding officer. In the midst of these was a taller feature, a blunt spike of rock which at one time in the youth of the world had been a plug of molten lava within the walls of a volcano. The walls had worn away, leaving this ominous fist of basalt standing alone. There had been a pagan altar on its summit when Corfe's engineers had first surveyed it. Now it had been partially hollowed out with immense, costly, dangerous labour, and provided a last-ditch refuge within the donjon itself, and a lofty look-out which gave a bird's-eye view of the entire Torrin river valley and the mountains on either side. Light guns had been sited in embrasures in its impregnable sides, and they commanded every approach. Men called this ominous-looking tower of stone the Spike.
The donjon and the Spike loomed over this flat-floored valley, which was perhaps three quarters of a mile wide. The soil here was fertile and dark, watered by the chill stream which hundreds of miles to the south and east grew into the Torrin river, and the soldiers of the garrison tended plots of land in the shadow of the fortress despite the mountain-swift growing season and the killer frosts of the winter. There were currently twenty-eight thousand men stationed at Gaderion. Many of them had wives who lived nearby, and a scattering of stone and log houses dotted the valley east of the walls. Officially, this was frowned upon, but in fact it was discreetly tolerated, else the separation between the men and their families would have been well-nigh unsupportable.
Square in the middle of the valley was a low, circular knoll some fifty feet high, and on this had been built the second of Gaderion's fortresses. The redoubt was a simple square structure with triangular casemates at each corner to catch any foes who reached the walls in a deadly crossfire. The North Road ran through it under the arches of two heavily defended gates, and before these gates were two redans which each mounted a battery of guns. Within the walls were housed the stables of the Royal couriers who kept Gaderion in touch with the larger world, and it was here also that the main sortie force of the fortress was billeted: some eight thousand men, half of them cavalry.
The last of Gaderion's fortresses was the Eyrie. This had been tacked on like a swallow's nest to the steep cliffs of the Candorwir, the mountain whose peak overlooked the valley on its western side. The stone of Candorwir had been hollowed out to accommodate three thousand men and fifty great guns, and the only way they could be reached was by a dizzy single-track mule path which had been blasted out of the very flank of the mountain. The guns of the Eyrie and the donjon formed a perfect crossfire which transformed the floor of the Torrin valley into a veritable killing ground in which each feature had been mapped and ranged. The gunners of Gaderion could, if they wished, shoot accurately at these features in the dark, for each gun had a log board noting the traverse and elevation of specified points on the approach to the walls.
The three fortresses, formidable in themselves, had a weak link which was common to all. This was the curtain wall. Forty feet high and almost as thick, it ranged in strange tortuous zigzags across the valley floor connecting the donjon to the redoubt and the redoubt to the cliffs at the foot of the Eyrie. Sharp-angled bartizans pocked its length every three hundred yards, and four thousand men were stationed along it, but strong though it seemed, it was the weakest element of the defences. Only a few guns were sited in its casemates, as Corfe had long ago decided that it was the artillery of the three fortresses which would protect the wall, not the wall itself. If it were overrun, then those three would still dominate the valley too thoroughly to allow the passage of troops. To force the passage of the Torrin Gap, an attacker would have to take all of them: the donjon, the redoubt, and the Eyrie. All told, twelve thousand men manned their defences, which left a field army of sixteen thousand to conduct offensive operations and patrols. Once this had seemed more than ample, but General Aras, officer commanding Gaderion, was no longer so sure.
Some six leagues to the north and west of Gaderion the narrow, mountain-girt gap opened out into the wider land of the Torian Plains beyond, and in the tumbled foothills which marked the last heights of the mountains a line of turf and timber structures signalled the beginning of the Thurian Line, the easternmost redoubt of the Second Empire. Here, with the conscripted labour of thousands, the forces of Himerius had reared up a great clay and wood barrier, part defensive wall, part staging post. It meandered over the grassy hills like a monstrous serpent, bristling with stockades and gabions and revetments. There were few heavy guns stationed along it, but huge numbers of men patrolled its unending length, and to the rear they had constructed sod-walled towns and roads of crushed stone. The smoke of their fires could be seen for miles, an oily smudge on the hem of the sky, and their shanty towns were surrounded by muddy quagmires through which columns of troops trudged ceaselessly, and files of cavalry plunged fetlock-deep. Here were garrisoned men of a dozen different countries and kingdoms reaching from Fulk in the far west to Gardiac in the heights of the Jafrar. Knights of Perigraine, looking like chivalric relics on their magnificently caparisoned chargers. Clanking gallowglasses from Finnmark with their greatswords and broadaxes. Almarkan cuirassiers with pistols strapped to their saddles. Knights Militant, as heavily armoured as the Perigrainians, but infinitely more businesslike. And Inceptines, no longer monks in habits, but now tonsured warriors on destriers wielding maces and clad in black-lacquered steel. They led ragged columns of men who wore no armour, wielded no weapons, but who were the most feared of all Himerius's soldiers: the Hounds of God. When a troop of these trotted down one of the muddy garrison streets, everyone, even the hulking gallowglasses, made room for them. The Torun-nans had yet to meet these things in battle, but they were the secret weapon upon which the Empire based many hopes.
A savage, low-intensity warfare had flickered over this disputed ground between the two defence lines now for several months. Each side sent out patrols to gather intelligence on the other, and when these met no quarter was asked or given. Scarcely two sennights previously, a Torunnan flying column of a thousand cuirassiers had slipped through the foothills to the north-east of the Thurian Line undetected, and had burned the bridges over the Tourbering river a hundred miles to the north. However, on their way back the Himerians had been ready for them, and barely two hundred of the heavy horsemen had survived to see the walls of Gaderion again.
A small group of lightly armed Torunnan cavalry reined in as evening drew on and prepared to bed down for the night on a low bluff within sight of the endless skein of lights that was the Thurian Line. They had been out of Gaderion three days on a reconnaissance, riding the entire length of the enemy fortifications, and were to return to barracks in the morning. Half their number stood guard while the rest unsaddled, rubbed down and fed their mounts, and then unrolled their damp bedrolls. When this had been done, the dismounted troopers remained standing and watchful as their comrades did the same. Five dozen tired, grimy men who wanted nothing more than to get through the night and back to their bunks, a wash, and a hot meal. The Torunnans were forbidden to light fires when between the lines, and thus their camps had been chill and cheerless, their food ration scarcely less so. By the time the horse lines were pegged out in the wooded ground at the foot of the bluff and the animals hobbled and deep in nosebags, it had become almost fully dark, the last light edging down behind the jagged sentinel bulk of Candor-wir behind them, and the seven stars of the Scythe bright and stark in a cloudless night sky.
The troopers' young officer, a lanky youth with straw-coloured hair, stood watching the line of lights glittering on the world perhaps ten miles away to the north and west. They arced across the land like a filigree necklace, too delicate to seem threatening. But he had seen them up close, and knew that the Himerians decorated those ramparts with Torunnan heads mounted on cruel spikes. The bodies they left out as carrion within gunshot of the walls.
'All quiet, sir', the troop sergeant told his officer, a shadow among other, faceless shadows.
'All right, Dieter. Turn yourself in as well. I reckon I'll watch for a while.'
But the sergeant did not move. He was staring down at the Thurian Line like his officer. 'Funny, behind the walls it's lively as an ants' nest someone has poked with a stick, but there's not hide nor hair of the bastards out here. Not one patrol! I haven't seen the like, and I've been stationed up here these past four years.'
'Yes, there's a bad smell in the air all right. Maybe the rumours are true, and it's the start of the war at last.'
'Saint's blood, I hope not.'
The young ensign turned to his sergeant, his senior by twenty years, and grinned. 'What's that? Aren't you keen to have a go at them, Dieter? They've been skulking behind those ramparts for ten years now. It's about time they came out and let us get at them.'
Dieter's face was expressionless. 1 was at Armagedir, lad, and in the King's Battle before that. I was no older than you are now and thought much the same. All young men's minds work the same way. They want to see war, and when they have seen it, they never want to see it again, providing they live through it.'
'No glory, eh?'
'Roche, you've been up here a year now. How much glory have you seen?'
'Ah, but it's just been this damn skirmishing. I want to see what a real fight is like, where the battle lines are a mile long and the thunder of it shakes the earth.'
'Me, I just want to get back to my bed, and the wife in it.'
'What about young Pier? He'll soon be of an age to sit a saddle or shoulder a pike. Is he to follow you into the tercios?'
'Not if I can help it.'
'Ah, Dieter, you're tired is all.'
'No, it's not that. It's the waiting, I think. These bastards have been building things up for a decade now, since the Torian Plains battle. They own everything between the Maivennors and the Cimbrics, right up to the sultanates in the Jafrar, and still they want more. They won't stop till we break 'em. I just want to get on with it, I suppose. Get it over with.'
He stopped, listening. In the horse lines among the trees the animals were restless and quarrelsome, despite being as tired as their riders. They were tugging at the picket ropes, trying to rear though their forelegs were securely hobbled.
'Something in the wind tonight,' the young ensign said lightly, but his face was set and hard.
The night was silent save for the struggling horses. The sentries down at the lines were trying to calm them, cursing and grabbing at their skewed nosebags.
'Something,' Dieter agreed. 'Sir, do you smell that?'
The ensign sniffed the air doubtfully. 'There must be an old fox's den nearby. That's what is spooking the horses.'
'No, it's different than that. Stronger.'
One of the sentries came running up to the two men with his sabre drawn. The metal glinted coldly in the starlight.
'There's something out there in the dark sir, something moving. It was circling the camp, and then I lost it in that gully down on the left. It's in the trees.'
The young officer looked at his sergeant. 'Stand to.'
But the nickering of the horses exploded into a chorus of terrified, agonising shrieks that froze them all where they stood. The sentries came running pell-mell from the horse lines, terrified. 'There's something down in there, Sergeant!'
'Stand to!' Dieter yelled at the top of his voice, though all through the bivouac men were already struggling out of their bedrolls and reaching for their weapons.
'What the hell's going on down there?'
'We couldn't see. They came out of the gully. Some kind of animals, black as a wolf's throat and moving on their hindquarters like men. But they aren't men, sir.'
Horses were trying pitifully to drag themselves up the rocky slope to the bivouac where their riders stood, trailing their picket ropes. But their forelegs were securely hobbled and they reared and screamed and tumbled to their sides and kicked out maniacally to their rear. The men could see the black berry-shine of blood on them now. One had been disembowelled and was slipping in its own entrails.
'Sergeant Dieter', the ensign said in a voice that shook, 'take a demi-platoon down to the horse lines and see what is happening there.'
Dieter looked at him a moment and then nodded. He bawled out at the nearest men and a dozen followed him reluctantly down into the wooded hollow from which the hellish cacophony of dying beasts resounded.
The rest of the men formed up on the bluff and watched them as they struck a path through the melee of terrified and dying beasts still struggling out of the trees. Two men were knocked from their feet. Dieter left them there, telling them to unhobble every horse they could. The terror-stricken animals mobbed the men, looking to their riders for protection. Then Dieter's group disappeared into the bottomless shadow of the wood that straggled along the foot of the bluff.
A stream of horses was galloping up the slope now as they were loosed of their restraints. The men tried to catch and soothe them but most went tearing off into the night. The men gathered around the ensign were as much baffled as afraid, and angry at the savagery of the attack on their horses. Many of the mounts that had escaped were bleeding from deep-slashed claw marks.
A single shout, cut short, as though the wind had been knocked out of the shouter.
'That was Dieter', one of the men on the bluff said.
There were alder and birch down in the hollow below the bivouac, and these began thrashing as though men were shaking their branches. Cursing the darkness, those on the hill peered down the slope, past the keening, crippled horses that littered the ground, and saw a line of black figures loom out of the trees like a cloud of shadow. The smell in the air again, but stronger now - the musk-like stink of a great beast. Something sailed across the night sky and thudded to the ground just short of their feet. They heard a noise that afterwards many would swear had resembled human laughter, and then one of their number was pointing at the thrown object lying battered and glistening on the earth before them. Their sergeant's head.