Great Kings' War Read Online Free PDF

They've got their minds on something."
    There was a shot from the trees, then the sound of hooves at a canter. One of the buckskin-clad scouts came plunging back down the trail, his horse churning up the fine powder snow into a silvery spray.
    "Your Majesty! There's a fire over the hill. Not too far. A big fire!"
    As an intelligence report the scout's words left a lot to be desired, but they told Kalvan enough to make him think about his tactics. Wolves could be ridden down with lances or swords, or shot from the saddle with pistols. A fire could mean bandits and they could shoot back. Two of this winter's worst problems appeared to be up and about tonight. At least they were also the two easiest to deal with.
    "Musketoons to the front," Kalvan ordered. That was ignoring the chain of command, of course, and one of these days he'd have to start being more careful. He also had time to wonder, not for the first time, if the confidence these people had in him was entirely justified. Do I really know what I'm doing?  
    Kalvan had known what he was doing when he'd shot his way out of that—call it cross-time flying saucer, for lack of a better term—that scooped him up out of Pennsylvania 1964 and dropped him off here-and-now. Of course most of that was self defense, a fairly simple job for the trained reflexes of Corporal Calvin Morrison of the Pennsylvania State Police and former sergeant, United States Army.
    It was when he landed that things started to get complicated. Here-and-now was still Pennsylvania, but nothing like the one he grew up in. It was an alternate Pennsylvania that had never heard of William Penn or even George Washington. From what he'd been able to deduce in the past year, this was an alternate Earth where the Indo-Aryan migrations had gone east across Siberia, then in ships to the northeast along the Aleutians, instead of moving into India and Pakistan as they had in Kalvan's home world.
    They had built city-states in all the natural harbors along the Pacific Coast as far down as Baja California. Later arrivals, proto-Germans who called themselves the Urgothi, had settled the Great Plains and the Mississippi River valley. Then, about five hundred years ago, there was a large-scale migration from the Pacific Coast to the Atlantic seaboard, where there was now a gaggle of what Winston Churchill had called "pumpernickel principalities."
    The local inhabitants of the Five Kingdoms had a late medieval to early-Renaissance culture and technology, with steel blades and gunpowder, using a back-acting flintlock. The monopoly of gunpowder gave Styphon's House, a here-and-now theocracy whose priesthood claimed that gunpowder (or "fireseed" as they called it) was a magical secret they alone knew passed down from their god, Styphon. Any ruler who defied them was put under the Ban of Styphon, which cut them off from any supply of fireseed—and that meant disaster.
    Prince Ptosphes of Hostigos was under such a ban from Styphon's House when Calvin Morrison landed in his small Princedom, helped rout an enemy cavalry raid and was accidentally shot by Ptosphes' daughter Rylla. He'd spent his convalescence in Tarr-Hostigos as a guest of the Prince. He'd had no qualms about telling the Hostigi what he thought of Styphon's House, an outfit as bad as Al Capone's mob, and taught them the fireseed formula so they could make their own. Then Calvin Morrison had helped them prepare for the coming battle against Styphon's Princely pawns; the alternative was having Rylla's lovely head stuck on a spike on the battlements of Tarr-Hostigos—well, that was as good as no choice at all.
    After that, developments had followed one another more or less inevitably. While the new Lord Kalvan had sometimes felt as if he were riding a runaway horse, he'd known there was no dismounting in mid-journey. More important, he could look back and say he hadn't made too many avoidable mistakes.
    Taking the castle Tarr-Dombra was easy; that was craft and