Hell's Foundations Quiver by David Weber Read Free Book Online Page B

after Langhorne’s Watch. Snow lay horse knee-high and powdery on level ground; where any obstacle had offered the opportunity, drifts with sharply sculpted edges rose as high as a man’s head or higher. The breath of the Raven’s Land caribou hauling the heavy sleds rose like smoke in the frigid air, and the sturdy High Hallows under the mounted men jetted white vapor like the fumes of an Old Earth dragon. The sky was a polished blue bowl, harder and colder than steel, without a hint of cloud. It was only a few hours past midday, but the sun was already well to the west, dipping towards the peaks of the Meirstrom Mountains and promising that the brief northern evening—and much longer winter night —were not far away.
    It was one of the coldest, bleakest vistas imaginable, Kynt Clareyk, the Baron of Green Valley, thought approvingly. He had no doubt the men of 1st Corps sorely missed the snug barracks they’d enjoyed at Allyntyn, but that was fine with him. And with them, too, if the truth be known. They were as impatient to be about their assigned task as he was.
    He glanced to the northeast, where a party of Siddarmarkian engineers swarmed about the fire-charred skeleton of a semaphore station. There was no way to tell whether it had been fired by Temple Loyalists during the Sword of Schueler’s initial onslaught or by Siddarmarkians loyal to their lord protector as they were driven from Northland by the rebellion, but whoever had set the blaze had done a less than thorough job of actually wrecking the station. Cables, pulleys, and the roof of the station crew’s barracks had been destroyed, yet the towering masts and the barracks’ stone walls remained, and the engineers would have it back in service by tomorrow afternoon. The stations were closer together across the bleak, rolling tableland of the Midhold Plateau because of how bad visibility became in the winter. Even with them restored to service, Green Valley’s communications with Allyntyn were likely to be sporadic, given that same limited visibility, but they ought to be good enough. His communications with the rest of the inner circle couldn’t care less about weather conditions, but since he’d left close to two-thirds of the Army of Midhold behind at Allyntyn under General Dymytryoh Brohkamp, who commanded his 2nd Corps, it behooved him to maintain the closest contact with Brohkamp that he could.
    There was a reason he’d stripped Brigadier Wylsynn Traigair’s 3rd Brigade, out of 1st Corps, transferred it temporarily to 2nd Corps, and left Brohkamp behind. Without Traigair, General Ahntahn Makrohry’s 1st Corps consisted only of two battalions of the 1st Scout Sniper Regiment, 3rd Mounted Brigade, and General Eystavyo Gardynyr’s 4th Division (Mountain). On the other hand, Makrohry himself had been raised amid the beautiful, bitter peaks of northern Chisholm’s Snow Crest Mountains, and all of his units had been exhaustively trained in winter warfare at Raylzberg, perched high in the westernmost spur of the Lonely Mountains above High Hallow’s Stonewater Lake. The Royal Chisholmian Army had made a point of acclimating all of its units to winter marches, but only about a third of the entire army had been trained in actual winter war fighting , which was a much more demanding regimen.
    Even with their training, it would have been difficult or impossible for the new Imperial Charisian Army to have put this many men into the field this far north at this time of year without the manufactories of Old Charis. The Chisholmian experts had designed the necessary equipment, but their designs—tweaked here and there without their knowledge by an AI named Owl—had been built by Rhaiyan Mychail’s textile manufactories and Ehdwyrd Howsmyn’s foundries. Green Valley suspected that many of those foundry and manufactory workers in semi-tropical Charis hadn’t quite been able to believe in