David Weber - Hell Hath No Fury

"I understand. Unfortunately, we've already encountered at least one weapon-those big, rotating things on the walls-that we'd never seen before. I'm not inclined to assume they don't have other, longerranged weapons we also haven't met up with before."

"Well," Toralk brought up his own copy of the information and paged through to a map generated from the Sharonian charts captured at Fort Ghartoun. "We could put them here or here, instead," he said, using his stylus to drop a pair of crosshairs onto the map. "Both spots are further from the fort, so Urlan's cavalry would have further to go, but there's a steep, solid mountain slope between both of them and the fort. From what we've seen tinkering around with those captured 'mortars' of theirs, I don't think even their weapons could drop something in that close on a reverse slope that steep."

"Um." Harshu frowned, contemplating the map. Then he nodded, although he still didn't look precisely enthralled.

"The other alternative, Sir, is to make it an infantry assault," Toralk pointed out. "If we throw the gryphons straight into their faces, and the tactical transports come in close behind them, we'd have the transports' breath weapons, such as they are, for support and the Sharonians would probably be too busy with the gryphons to knock many of them down."

"Tempting," Harshu acknowledged. "Very tempting, in some ways. But our men are going to need heavy weapons support if they're going to have a chance against Sharonian weapons at close range. And as you pointed out, we may need those transports' breath weapons later on, especially if this attack doesn't succeed. Besides, if we can take Salby, infantry is going to be more useful than cavalry afterward for defending the sort of terrain between the fort and the portal."

He gazed down at the map for several more minutes, rubbing his chin, then paused.

"You know," he said slowly, "if we timed it properly, we might still be able to use the transports after all." Toralk's eyes narrowed, and his superior looked up at him with a smile. "If you were a Sharonian, Klayrman, and you'd never seen anything like a dragon or an augmented horse or a unicorn, which of the three would monopolize your attention if you saw all of them coming at you at once?"

"Aruncas!" Tarnal Garsal, Windlord Garsal, muttered.

The second lord of horse stood in Sunlord Markan's command post, looking back at the smokestreaming PAAF fort behind them, and he had ample reason to invoke the Uromathian god of war. Both cavalry officers, like Rof chan Skrithik, were veterans of long service. And, like chan Skrithik, neither of them had ever seen or imagined anything like this.

Actually, Garsal found the smoke and flames almost comforting in their normality. At least they were much less disconcerting than the enormous beast-the dragon, he told himself, using the Ternathian Crown Prince's terminology as he looked back at it-which had crashed to earth less than sixty yards from the CP. It loomed like a scaly mountain of broken bone and flesh where it had landed, crushing a dozen of Garsal's cavalry troopers in its death plunge.

"Aruncas, indeed," a voice said at Garsal's shoulder.

He turned his head and saw Sunlord Markan gazing out across the sandbags at the same sight. The first lord of horse was the second ranking officer of the Salby garrison, which had made him the proper choice to command the infantry and artillery positions outside the fort itself. He didn't exactly look shaken … but his expression came far closer to that than anything Garsal had ever seen from him before.

"I didn't really believe him, you know," Garsal said. Markan glanced at him and raised one eyebrow. "I suppose I didn't want to believe him," Garsal admitted, and this time Markan snorted.

"I imagine most of us would have preferred not to," the sunlord said after a moment. "It's like something out of a child's fairytale about monsters, ogres, and magic spells."

Garsal nodded, and Markan turned his eyes back to the monstrous, broken-winged carcass sprawled across the mangled bodies of his men.

There was another reason Garsal hadn't wanted to believe Prince Janaki, the sunlord thought. Another reason he hadn't wanted to, for that matter.

Markan had his own very private reservations about his Emperor, but Chava Busar was still his Emperor, and-up to this moment, at least-Markan had found himself forced to agree with Emperor Chava on at least one point: far too many people in Sharona were reacting with far too much panic to the reports from the frontiers.

Stories about "magic" simply didn't belong in the everyday world of hardheaded, practical men. Oh, no one had questioned the fact that the Arcanans were actually there, or that they had massacred the Chalgyn Consortium survey crew with frighteningly unknown weapons. But Hell's Gate was forty-eight thousand miles from Sharona, and hard on the news of the massacre had come the word that less than four hundred men had taken the swamp portal away from the enemy with ludicrous ease. Sharonian weapons had been clearly and obviously superior to anything they had yet faced, and nothing else the Arcanans had demonstrated since that short, brutal battle had been especially terrifying. Surely not enough to justify the almost hysterical response of certain of Sharona's political leaders!

Whatever happened out on the distant frontier, there was no real chance of an enemy successfully fighting his way through the portals and all of the wearisome miles between them to actually reach Sharona. Even assuming that all of those arguing in favor of some sort of worldwide-hells, multiversewide-empire were genuinely sincere in their motivations and not simply seeking to manipulate the political equation for their own advantage (which seemed unlikely, to say the least), it would have been foolish to allow oneself to be caught up in the hysteria.

Now, smelling the smoke from Fort Salby, looking at the huge, broken body of a genuine dragon while he awaited the second assault from a force which had advanced four thousand miles in less than two weeks, Jukan Darshu, Sunlord Markan, knew those "hysterical" leaders had been right all along. If the Arcanans had dragons that breathed fire and spat lightning, if they could cover eight percent of the total distance to Sharona in only two weeks, then the gods alone knew what else they might have or be able to do. It was entirely possible that they could fight their way clear to Sharona, after all … and that Zindel of Ternathia and Ronnel of Farnalia had been dead serious from the outset. That whatever Chava Busar might think, Zindel had not been manufacturing and manipulating the crisis which had impelled him to the throne of a united Sharona.

Firsoma! he thought. If the Crown Prince Saw this in a Glimpse, what has his father Seen?

He didn't much care for that question, for a lot of reasons.

Of course you don't. You're a Uromathian, and Uromathians don't like Ternathians, do they? But if the Arcanans have capabilities like this, then maybe the Conclave was right. Maybe we can't afford to be Uromathians or Ternathians any longer … even if it does mean putting another crown on Zindel chan Calirath's head.

"They're coming back."

Regiment-Captain chan Skrithik twitched as Janaki spoke for the first time in at least half an hour.

"Your Highness?"

"They're coming back," Janaki repeated in that same otherworldly tone. "They're using their dragons to circle around the other aspect of the portal in Karys. Then they're going to use the western aspect in Traisum and swing wide, try to keep us from seeing them while they put cavalry on the ground."

"Cavalry? In the open against dug-in infantry and artillery?" Chan Skrithik couldn't believe what he was hearing.