Rictus looked west, the world spanning out below his gaze.
To his right there rose the vast dark bulk of Kerusiad Hill. Below him were the narrow contoured streets of the Goshen Quarter. All Machran lay before him, speckled with lights, a vast beast rolling out to the horizon in the fitful moonlight. Corvus’s attack was marked by a long cluster of blazing torches down in the Avennan Quarter some two pasangs away.
Phobos – I hope he keeps the bastards off our back a little longer.
The Dogsheads and Igranians fought along the walls, the heavily armoured mercenaries locking shields and battling forward foot by foot, the Igranians darting in and out with stabbing javelins and drepanas. Rictus saw one of his own men trip over a corpse and go flying into the air – he tumbled off the wall and struck the roof of a house below with an explosion of clay tiles, then slid down the incline, scrabbling for a hold, before pitching to the street below, the shattering impact of the cobbles breaking the body within the armour.
Rictus’s eye was drawn to the streets on his left. Some kind of torchlit procession was pouring along it, like a flame-crested serpent of immense size.
“They’re bringing up reserves!” He shouted. “Make some space, lads – we need more men up here!”
A ladder was shoved back from the walls, a Machran soldier pushing it off with his feet. It swung sideways with a dozen men still clinging to it, and went down with a sickening crash, crushing a whole file of men below.
The troops at the foot of the walls were frantic to ascend the ladders and help their comrades above. A crowd of them clambered up one while more held it steady at the top of the wall, urging them on, pulling them over the battlements as they reached the top.
Then there was a tearing crack, and the ladder broke in the middle. It went down in pieces, men still clinging to it.
One of the men in an embrasure caught a friend by the arm as he fell, held him for a moment, and then was pulled down with him, the two soaring into the crowded carnage below with their fists still locked together.
“Steady, boys!” Rictus shouted, dismayed, “Ten to a ladder, no more!”
The press on the walls was tightening again. One of the great towers of Machran loomed over them to the west; they were fighting towards it under a hail of stones and javelins. The defenders were even throwing shields and helms down upon them. Rictus felt his feet slithering in blood. He raised his shield instinctively as something came at him, a half-guessed shadow of a lunge. A blade clanged off the bronze face and he sent the drepana under his attacker’s guard. It went in below the man’s cuirass.
As Rictus pulled the weapon free he felt the stitches in his arm open up and a hot flow of blood ran down his fist, gluing the sword to his fingers.
There was a whoosh of air over his head – he felt it tug at the transverse crest of his helm – and something flew through the night above him. A clang, and a knot of men behind him went down as though flattened by a giant fist.
He stared uncomprehending for a long moment, disbelief sawing the breath in and out of his throat. A massive spear or bolt, thick as a man’s wrist, had skewered three of his men, bursting through their armour as though the bronze were gilded paper.
“Ballistas!” Fornyx shouted across at him. “I thought those bastards didn’t work anymore!”
Another tore overhead, like some raptor stooping for the kill. On the crowded battlements it could not miss. Rictus saw two Igranians pinned to a Machran spearman, the three joined by the long barbed shaft of the missile.
Men were pouring out of the tower, and more were fighting their way up the stairs to the catwalks, a flood of them with torchlight and moonlight splintering across their armour, playing across it in gleams and flashes. There was open space around Rictus. His own men were falling back to the remaining ladders. The tide of battle had shifted. The ballista bolts hammered into the ranks and knocked men down like skittles.
Fornyx was at his side, supporting Druze. The dark Igranian had a death mask for a face. His bound arm gleamed black with blood.
“Let’s ask them if they want to surrender,” Fornyx said, his teeth white in his beard.
“Get back to the ladders, Fornyx – this isn’t working.”
“Not those fucking ladders again,” Druze groaned.
“Where’s Valerian?”
“Down the wall towards the other tower – same story down there.” Fornyx spat. “The towers are killing us.”
Rictus stood up straight. The ramparts had been flooded with his men and Druze’s. Now the tide had gone out. There was only a wrack of flotsam and jetsam left – and bodies, so many bodies. They choked the catwalks so thickly that they were entangling the feet of the living. The Machran troops who had manned these walls were nearly all dead, but more were on their way, hundreds more.
“The attack has failed,” he said. He looked around.
Some two dozen Dogsheads were standing in a tight phalanx. Stones and arrows were raining down on them, clanging off their helms and shields. Everyone else was making for the ladders. The Companions in the second wave had not yet climbed them in any numbers. The traffic was all the other way now.
“This is the rearguard. I stand here. Fornyx, get the rest back down the wall. Have good men at the ladders – for Phobos’s sake don’t overload them, or we’ll all die up here.”
“Don’t play it the hero, Rictus – Phobos!” They all ducked as another ballista bolt soared over them.
“We’ve got to get us some of those,” Druze said wryly.
“Go, brother,” Rictus said. “And try not to fall on your ass.”
Back to the task at hand. The strength was going from Rictus’s right arm, the blood hanging from it in snot-thick threads. He butted his attackers back with the heavy shield, the drepana darting out in quick, economical lunges, wounding more often than killing. A jet of anger as he regretted his cheap stabbing sword, still back in camp.
The men at his shoulders stood with him unquestioning. In the dark and chaos of the fighting he could not even be sure of their names, though they saved his life again and again, as he saved theirs.
They worked together, fighting for each other against the flood of foes that came barrelling down the catwalk. They fell back step by stubborn step, retreating over their own dead, closing up the gaps left by the fallen. It was a kind of fighting they knew well, and they understood also that behind them their brothers were queuing up at the ladder-heads on the walls.
To break now would mean the end of them all. They bargained away their own lives for the sake of the army, for the Dogsheads, for their centon.
For none of those things. They did it for their friends.
Finally they could retreat no more. Of the men who had climbed up the ladders with the setting of the moon, perhaps half made it back down again. The last ladder broke, and fell in shattered bloody splinters amid the terrible wreckage at the foot of the wall.
On the battlements above, Rictus stood at bay with a pair of bloodied companions, the dead piled around their feet. There was a grey in the air that heralded the dawn, and he could see the vast city that was the cynosure of the Macht world rising in front of him on its hills, brightening moment by moment.
He tossed down his broken sword, his arm almost too numb to feel it leave his fist. His shield followed, and finally he lifted off his battered and pitted helm, feeling the cold air on his face, cooling the sweat upon it.
The enemy soldiers halted, panting. One of them, a centurion by his crest, raised a broken spear.
“Nicely fought. Toss that fine black cuirass over here and we’ll let you live.”
Rictus looked at his two companions, who had also doffed their helms and were breathing in the cold air like thirsty men gulping water.