Mercedes Lackey: The Price Of Command

“You’re dead right about that, my lord,” she said, answering the boy’s glance without speaking to him directly. “I can’t think of anything worse than fighting a religious fanatic, especially one that’s sure he’s going to some kind of paradise if he dies for his god. That kind’ll charge your lines, run right up your blade, and kill himself in order to take your head off.”

She peered through the sun, the heat-haze, and the dust, and cursed again under her breath, resolutely shaking off the weariness that was the legacy of her sleepless night. It was pretty obvious that both armies had stalemated each other. Her people were out of it, for now; they’d done what they could early this morning, and now they were behind the lines, taking what rest they could, and awaiting further orders. And with only a handful of dead and twice that wounded. New recruits, mostly, and no one I really knew well. Gods pass their souls.

For once, she wasn’t having to prove herself and her Company to anyone. Daren had made her pretty well autonomous; he trusted her judgment and her battle sense. He knew she had twice the actual combat experience he or any of his commanders had. He knew that if she saw an opening where the Skybolts could do some good, she’d send them. That was more trust than Kero had gotten from any other Commander, and she wondered if he treated all mercenary Captains like that, or only her, because he knew her.

Right now, the action was all afoot, and hand-to-hand, and there was no place for a mounted force to go—except for the heavy cavalry, who kept trying to plow through the enemy lines without getting trapped behind them.

A glitter of sun-reflection caught her eye and she grimaced at the shrine of Vkandis anchoring the left flank. The damn thing is the rallying point for the entire line, she thought angrily. Every time those idiots haul it forward a couple of paces, the whole left flank follows it.

It was pulled on clumsy rollers by nearly a hundred of the most manic of the Prophet’s followers. Every day now they’d added captured booty and ornamentation to it, making it more impressive, more elaborate, and doubtless making it heavier as well. The latest trick had been to gild the roof; that was what had caught her eye, the shine of sun on gold-leaf. She wondered how many poor peasants had been starved to pay for the ornamentation.

Another blur of motion caught her eye, and one more familiar—the yellow-gray streak that marked the passage of one of Geyr’s messenger-dogs behind the lines. The poor beasts looked like nothing more than bags of bones, but they moved like lightning incarnate. Geyr had brought them with him when he’d joined; Kero gathered that in his country, men raced the pups the way the folk of the north raced horses. He had the notion that they could be used as messengers, but only Kero had been willing to take a chance on his idea. They were amazingly intelligent for their size; once they knew that a particular human carried a horn full of lumps of suet or balls of butter on his belt, they had that person’s name and scent locked in memory for all time, and anyone could put a message in their collars and tell them to find that person, and they would. No matter what stood in their way. The scrawny little beasts would literally race through fire for a bit of fat. Geyr had once said, laughingly, that if you buttered a brick, they’d eat it.

The little dog evaded people and horses with equal ease, then stopped dead for a moment. Before Kero had a chance to ask Geyr what was wrong with it, the beast was off again, this time streaking in their direction, so low to the ground that his chest must be scraping the earth.

“Meant for me, which means you, Captain,” Geyr muttered, as the dog dove fearlessly among the hooves of the Skybolts’ horses and out the other side of the picket lines. She recognized it now by the scarlet collar—it was the one they’d sent with Shallan’s scouts.

It flung itself through the air, landing in Geyr’s waiting arms; panting, but not with exhaustion. This punishing heat was no more bother to Geyr’s dogs than to Geyr himself.

The black Lieutenant gave the little animal his reward, and passed the message cylinder from its collar to Kero. She opened it, and scanned the short scrawl with a sinking heart. Shallan had seen something important, and had dutifully reported it. And Daren would most certainly see the way to break the deadlock that Shallan’s observation opened up. She knew how he thought, and it was the only logical course of action—only now it was no longer counters on a sand-table they put at risk, it was her men’s and women’s lives. But something had to be done, or they’d risk more Karsite intervention before they had neutralized the Prophet.

Even it meant her people would die.

And if by some chance he doesn’t see it, I’ll have to point it out to him. Gods have mercy....

Her throat closed. She passed him the note without comment; his brows creased as he puzzled out Shallan’s crabbed and half-literate printing. Then he looked up into her eyes.

“She says there’s a way to get to the shrine, coming up the bed of the stream.”

Kero nodded, and cleared her throat discreetly. They know what they’re getting paid to do. “But if you sent foot, they’d see you coming in time and reinforce the lines there.”

“But if I sent horse-archers with fire-arrows ... they’d move too quickly for the Prophet’s commanders to see what we were up to and maneuver foot into place. And if the shrine goes, the whole army will panic.”

Kero closed her eyes for a moment to think. There might yet be a way to spare her people. “We’ve tried this before,” she reminded him. “Getting the shrine was one of the first things we thought of, and we couldn’t even touch it.”

“But not using the horse-archers,” he retorted. “We didn’t have a clear shot at it with the archers before; we tried for it using magic. It’s shielded against magic, but I’d be willing to bet it isn’t shielded against plain old fire-arrows. It wasn’t shielded against that ballista shot that took off a corner of the roof. If it can be hit, it can be burned.”

Dear gods, there’s no hope for it. Either they go in, impossible odds and all, or we lose. Her stomach knotted, and her throat ached with sorrow for the slaughter to come. Bad enough to send her people into an ordinary battle, where the odds were in their favor because of their strike-and-run tactics. But this—

She swallowed, stared off into the distance, and tried to think of them as markers on a table. Running the tactic straight—she’d lose about half of those that went in.

But she had the only force that could get in, get the job done, and get out.

It’s a suicide mission ! half of her cried in agony. It’s necessary, said the other half, coldly, logically. She took a deep breath, lowered her eyes, and looked straight back into Daren’s. And saw that he didn’t like the odds any better than she did. He hated the cost of this as much as she. She saw the same pain she felt in the back of his eyes, and it steadied her.

“All right,” she said. “Give me time to set this up, right to requisition what I might need from your quartermaster, then get us an escort in and out. Leave the rest to us. Geyr, on me.”

She turned on her heel, and walked off without another word. How can I even up the odds? There has to be a way. The black man whistled to his dog and followed after her, as she strode down toward the picket line, and the rows of horses drowsing in the sun, oblivious to the battle beyond.

“Get me Quenten,” she called as she reached the lines and lounging fighters jumped to their feet. She scanned them, looking for the bright white of Lieutenants’ badges. She spotted one, and providentially, it was exactly the person she needed most. “Losh,” she ordered, not slacking her pace in the least, as she kept straight on through the lines. “Get the horse-archers to the Healers’ tent. The rest of you, at ease.”