A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor
Chapter 1708 - 1708: The Emperor - Part 2

And now they were but a day away from their enemy. Less, if Karstly were to be asked. He intended for them to march throughout the night, and attack with the coming of dawn.

"Our men will be exhausted then," Samuel pointed out.

"It matters not. Adrenaline will see them through. That, and the thrill of being the attacker, striking the enemy in the rear," Karstly said.

"What of Skullic? Will he know to match us, without word from us, or a bird?"

"He will if he's the man that I suppose him to be," Karstly said. "If he fails to see the opportunity, then it is better for us if he remains in that castle of his until this war is done."

"As forgiving as ever, my Lord…" Samuel said. "You might be inclined to win a few more friends if you didn't have such harsh expectations of your allies," Samuel said.

Karstly smiled his usual carefree smile at the advice, which told Samuel everything he needed to know. The young Lord might have heard him, but he only heard him in the way that a King hears a jester. It was an amusing joke to him, and no more than that.

If there was one more point of contention that Samuel had with his Lord's rather unreasonable plan – and Karstly indeed was a wellspring of unreasonable plans – it was the territory that they were being forced to quick march through.

Anywhere else, it would have been a difficult endeavour, but in the likes of the Skreen, it was even worse. Never was there a more rugged, more difficult territory to move an army through. Rocky shards big enough to be called mountains thrust themselves up out of the earth at regular intervals. It was hardly a mountain range in the sense that Samuel knew them to be. There was no one grand line of formation. These were more like the upright spears of a marching infantry. There were hundreds of sharps, all jammed up together, marking the already difficult and undulating terrain and making it worse.

It wasn't just mountainous and slick with snow, and then made all the worse in navigation for the many trees that sprung up in their way. It was also unpredictable. One would follow a path, using the instincts that any good navigator would have built up over their years of traversing territory foreign to them, only to be hit by the solid wall of one of those many shards.

Even the likes of Karstly were caught out more than once, so unpredictable was the geography. He had to turn them around twice throughout the course of their nighttime marching, and have them go back another way, slowing them down further.

It was in such moments, for all the stress that he put on the rest of them to move more quickly, that one would expect Karstly to grow short of temper. That his irritation might boil up more and more like a kettle over the fire. But Karstly was not such a man. In the face of those mistakes – and even the mistakes of his subordinates – he had the same carefree disposition that he always did. Casual, and terrifying, with eyes that saw amusement in all things. As if this were all a grand joke.

Joke it might very well have been, but Samuel had not seen his Lord this intensely focused on anything in nearly a decade. Even the campaigning against the Verna had not excited him as much as this. It ought to have been a simple rear attack on a distracted enemy, and yet, Karstly moved as if it was something grander.

To see a man that enjoyed a complicated story as much as Karstly brought to such an intensity by it naturally pulled Samuel closer to alarm than he often fought with. But there was naught he could do about it. Whatever his Lord might have seen, or what he might have sensed, Samuel could not detect the slightest whiff of it.

He only hoped that Karstly's motivations weren't as immature as matching the recklessness that Oliver Patrick had shown all the way to the west with his defeating of the Emerson army, but Samuel certainly could not put it past him. Karstly's disposition was certainly something that a harsher man could have called childish. His was a childishness done with a degree of attachment, though. For indeed, when they had received the news of Oliver Patrick's victory, there had been other Generals, in Blackthorn and even in Rainheart, who – at the same time as delighting in the victory – had felt robbed, and almost jealous of the younger man's achievements.

Karstly had not shown the slightest little twitch of that. Whether it was simply arrogance that kept him from being jealous of another man's achievements – with Karstly believing quite strongly that he would soon match them himself – or whether it was something altogether less mortal, and more mystical, that too, as with everything about Karstly, seemed impossible to tell.

His Lord held up a hand all of a sudden, bringing his men to a halt. A detachment of a thousand cavalry, and four thousand infantry, that was what Karstly brought with him, and it was the cavalry that was having the hardest time with the increasingly steep and icy terrain. Many had to get off their mounts and lead them by foot, and a handful more had taken the risk, only to slip and fall down into the abyss below.

"Beyond those trees," Karstly told them. The General looked back over his shoulder, towards the sky. His look of concentration blossomed into one of his usual smiles when he saw the light of the sun picking its way up over the horizon. "And right on time too."

Samuel didn't bother to comment on the genius of that – that they had made it here exactly when Karstly planned to, despite taking several wrong turns. That realm of calculation that Karstly dwelled in was something that his own professors in strategy had given up following him into over a decade ago, when the young General was still at an age when one might have called him a child.