The Guns of Empire by Django Wexler Page A

said. “I’m pleased to report that we’ve pushed the Borels back to their main line, not that they made much of a fight of it. As best we can tell, they don’t know this is anything more than a cavalry probe, but that’ll change as soon as we come over this next ridge. They’ve got a dozen guns on high ground.”
    Winter felt a chill.
A dozen guns?
A full battery waiting for them didn’t sound like the token defense Janus had promised. “Any infantry?”
    â€œSkirmishers and cavalry were all we saw. But there’s plenty of dead ground for them to hide in.”
    Winter nodded. “Bobby, get the regiments formed up and ready to march. Cyte, with me; we’re going to have a look. Colonel, can you lead us to a decent vantage?”
    â€œOf course, sir. Follow me.”
    They’d halted in a lightly wooded valley, where the road that more or less followed the course of the river took a dogleg to the north to cut across a stream and get around a long ridgeline. Erdine led them up the hill, ignoring the rough terrain. Cyte was a good enough rider that Winter felt like she and Edgar were holding the party back, though the gelding’s calm pace meant that he could step over the rocks and fallen branches easily enough. In a few minutes they reached a spot where the spindly birches and oaks thinned out, and Erdine dismounted. Winter and Cyte followed him onto bare rock, breaking out of the tree line on the back of an enormous boulder.
    It was, as promised, an excellent view. The Ytolin winked and glittered off to the left, and Winter could see the roofs of the town of Gilphaite. Clouds of smoke were visible there, the whitish billows of powder smoke and the black columns that rose from burning buildings. The artillery was still clearly audible, along with an occasional distant crash as solid shot plowed into a wall.
    The all-important bridge was not visible, however, because the ground to the north of the river rose into a hill and blocked her view. It was more of a gentle roll in the ground than a steep height, fenced pastures green with new grass and fields still mostly brown and muddy. As Erdine had said, there were a dozen guns deployed on its crest, arranged in three-gun half batteries separated by several hundred yards.
    Between the ridge on which they stood and the hill was a long, flat stretch, perhaps a mile and a half across. At the moment it was occupied only by scatteredgroups of cavalry, some still ahorse, others dismounted and crouching behind isolated trees or hedgerows. Puffs of musket smoke, like tiny balls of cotton, showed when each man fired his weapon, followed moments later by the distant
crack
of the shot. On the lower slopes of the hill, someone was firing back. Winter brought up her spyglass and saw figures in muddy red uniforms, similarly hunkered into cover.
    For all the energy the cavalry and skirmishers put into the long-range firefight, the inaccuracy of their weapons at distance meant that this was the kind of combat that could be kept up all day without more than a few hits on either side. Winter counted the shots from the hill and tried to estimate the number of enemy skirmishers.
A couple of hundred, maybe?
Unlike the Hamveltai, who’d been repeatedly thrown off by the loose-order tactics of the Vordanai volunteers, the Borelgai army had been well schooled in such matters by endless brushfire conflicts in its colonies south of Khandar and had developed its own doctrines to counter them.
It’s not going to matter, though, if they haven’t got a lot more men back there.
    â€œI’ll stay here,” she said. In the training camp, Janus had repeatedly impressed on her the importance of senior officers not leading from the front. “Cyte, go back to Abby and tell her to send me up a dozen runners. She’s to take the Girls’ Own over the ridge and push that skirmish line back, right over the top of the hill if she