Chapter 393 — Setting the Ambush

The army of fifty thousand broke camp and marched out, pipes and drums sounding the whole way, loud and merry, carrying an air of rejoicing about it — and a din beyond all bearing.

Count Horsman and his gleaming knightly order were the brightest color in that column: knights in brand-new plate rode tall warhorses, while their retainers, armored likewise, bore brightly dyed banners at their sides, singing at the top of their voices as they went the ballad "The Lost Soldier Tom," known in every household of the Southern Frontier, and the musicians in the train struck up bagpipes and hand drums — bright-toned instruments whose purpose was to let the companies nearby fix where their commander rode; as a rule the musicians blew so every ten li, to keep the whole column from dissolving into utter disorder.

Yet even with all this, the column still looked extraordinarily confused, and that could not be helped: so vast a host crowded together, and owing allegiance to several dozen different nobles, among whom anything like coordination was well-nigh impossible; the whole army stretched along the Wangshao Road that runs north to south in a long and broken chain — by the time the vanguard quitted the Carroll domain, those who started last had not yet left their camps.

But Count Horsman minded none of it. To his mind, for those petty country nobles to march in the same direction as the main host was already the very best they could achieve; one could not expect the clod-footed yokels they had scraped up from field and furrow — men who knew nothing but drinking themselves blind and brawling — to match his own knightly order in discipline and fighting spirit. And a little disorder in the column did not matter now; the destination was still far off. In the days to come the army's chief business was simply to march, and there were still many companies of distant nobles who had not yet reached the Carroll domain and were even now upon the road; these latecomers would keep trickling in over the next few days, so there was no sense in setting the ranks to rights at this point.

Let it be disorderly. He had fifty thousand men — enough, surely, to trample all of Cecil flat.

And besides... those ragged country retainers in their shabby leather or chainmail had never been any true strength to begin with; they were only kindling to be flung onto the field and stop the gaps with corpses. The strength that truly counted was the Transcendents in the army.

So thinking, Count Horsman turned his gaze to the column marching beside him, and saw his proud knights, and the robed mages escorted in their midst, and last the priests in holy white robes marching behind the knightly order together with the church knights they led — men in stout armor or gorgeous vestments, lofty and reserved of bearing, standing out sharply in mien among the jumbled, vulgar soldiers round about them.

These were the forces he truly trusted.

...

North of the Kant domain, the artillery position on Windward Hill had already been laid out; Philip had ridden its length, inspected each firing group in turn, and now returned to the center of the position.

His gaze swept the whole of it, and in that gaze were not only the Cecil combat troops, strict in discipline and swift in action, and their gun emplacements, but also, behind the position, the men of the Kant Corps — the Second Combat Corps — lending a hand, who looked rather confused and flustered.

Three thousand soldiers of the First Corps stood ready here; the rest were all from the "Second Corps," newly raised in the Kant region — but the latter were not the mainstay of the fighting. Their task was to help lay out the position, to serve in logistics, and... to stand by and watch the battle.

The Second Corps had begun proper military training, but their time at it was short after all, and the habits and mindset of the old-style noble retainer were still deeply rooted in these men; no crash course could cure that. But Philip believed that letting them witness the First Corps' way of fighting with their own eyes on the field would greatly loosen those stubborn notions — a thing already well proven among the Kant knights.

The leader of the Kant knights, Walder Perich, a man past middle age, stood on a raised platform on the hill in the newly issued armor, the new-type weapon called the "Molten-Cleave Sword" in his hand, watching the soldiers bustle about this place they called the "artillery position." The gentle hill had been armed through and through: great stretches of ground leveled, then dug with all manner of trenches and "gun pits," the great weapons called "magic-crystal railguns" planted in the pits in a crisscross, staggered pattern, and between the pits communication trenches for hauling shells and men; the Cecil soldiers in their burnished armor ran swiftly along those trenches, and by the simplest of orders their movements took on an astonishing orderliness and... beauty — a thing Walder had not seen in all his decades of soldiering.

The battlefields in his memory had been far simpler than this, cruder, and far more chaotic.

As for this peculiar "artillery position"... that lay even further beyond his understanding.

He had indeed seen magic-crystal railguns; he even knew that this type of gun was named "Justice." But he had only ever seen such weapons test-fired on level, orderly ground, and he had once supposed that was how railguns fought. Now, seeing this strange position and the gunners' practiced preparations, he realized that what he had witnessed that day was the crudest, shallowest thing of all.

A woman knight with brown hair falling to her shoulders stepped up onto the platform and came to Walder Perich's side: "Master Walder, I hear... we are not to take part in the coming battle?"

The old knight did not turn his head: "By order, unless the enemy can fight his way up this hill, neither the Kant knights nor the whole Second Corps joins the battle."

The woman knight frowned despite herself, her valiant face showing displeasure: "Is that not contempt for us?"

"It is training for the Second Corps, young Margarita," Walder said, turning at last at that complaint to look at the woman knight before him — the most gifted of the Kant domain's women knights and the nearest to mid-rank, but too young after all, and not steady enough. "Do not forget, the Second Corps has not even finished basic drill; they have not memorized the new combat orders. Would you send them onto the field to make a muddle of things?"

"They have not memorized them, but we have," the woman knight said indignantly. "Right now our brothers and sisters are leading soldiers to dig earth and haul stone behind the Cecil men, to carry shells and spellweb base panels, and when the fighting starts there is nothing for us... It is plain that they still do not trust us. We have already sworn our allegiance, and we have kept strictly to the lord's commands all along..."

"Then go on keeping to them, knight," Walder cut her off. "If a knight cannot even obey his master's command, then however well he fights on the field, there is no honor in it."

The woman knight had no answer and could only lower her head a little, but Walder knew that Margarita's grievance was shared by the other Kant knights as well, so he went on: "Margarita, what do you think of that new armor and new sword of yours?"

"Armor and sword?" The woman knight blinked, then looked down at the alloy armor on her body — stamped with the Cecil steel mark, faint magical radiance flowing in its seams, strange in shape yet full of a sense of beauty — and at the Molten-Cleave Sword at her waist, and nodded without thinking. "They are fine things... At first, when I took off the armor handed down in my family and put on this 'standard-issue equipment,' I felt a little regret, but now I think they truly are good goods — this sword especially is far better than my old fine-steel blade."