In the moment before impact, Rictus saw the ranks of the enemy recoil before him, the line of citizen spears fracturing right in front of the gate. They had never seen a spearline advance like this before, and the redcloaked mercenaries had acquired a fearsome reputation during the course of the siege. Half-starved citizen spearmen of Arkadios and Avennos and Machran itself flinched at the moment of impact, backing in on themselves.
The Dogsheads struck. Rictus lifted his spear clear of the melee in the first moments to keep it from shattering. So great was the pressure of the advancing men behind him that he was propelled into the ranks of the enemy. An aichme broke in pieces upon the breast of his cuirass. Another struck his shield so hard that it penetrated the bronze facing and broke off in the oak beneath. There were snarling, terrified faces inches from his own. One man had lost his helm, and Rictus head-butted him at once, the heavy bronze of his awn helm mashing bone and flesh, one eye glaring out of the red ruin before the man went down, lost underfoot.
The Dogsheads kept their formation, a red lance aimed square at the open gateway of the South Prime. Men were trying to push the massive gates closed, but so great was the press of bodies in the gatehouse that it was impossible; they succeeded only in packing the crowd of shouting spearmen tighter.
Here the work began, and the discipline told. The Dogsheads settled in to the fight, choosing their targets, jabbing overhand at helm-slots, glimpses of flesh at the necks of cuirasses. Rictus saw an enemy spearman’s arm pierced clean through by the spear of someone behind him. The man jerked his flesh off the aichme and the keen blade sliced him open like a cut of meat, exposing bone.
Blood sprayed through the air, hot and steaming in the cold. Rictus stabbed one man through the eye-guard of his helm, and his own spearhead snapped off as the fellow went down. There was no way to switch to the sauroter, not in that packed mass, so Rictus continued to stab out with the splintered shaft of the spear, grunting as he did so like a man at heavy labour in his fields.
The roar of the othismos rose up, enveloped them all. The struggle in the gate had become a different kind of world, a place of bronze and iron and lacerated flesh, men screaming, men underfoot, men pushing on the armoured torsos of their fellows. It was a dark, sodden universe of carnage.
But it was moving inexorably backwards, into the shadow of the walls. The deep formation of the Dogsheads, all that massive concentration of power, shewed the line of the defenders in on itself. The mercenaries maintained their ranks, while those of Machran disintegrated. The defenders fought bitterly, but they were fighting now as individual men in a mob, and only the brute mass of their numbers held their attackers in place.
And they were dying fast. The Dogsheads had lost scores of their number, the defenders of Machran many hundreds, shunted backwards, stumbling into the press to be trampled and suffocated, or stabbed by the aichmes and sauroters of the attackers. They could not present a coherent front, and the struggle in the gateway became a business, an exchange of lives for space. It was pure and simple killing.
Rictus found himself struggling uphill, and could not quite account for it until his foot slid on the convex bowl of a shield. He was stepping on a mound of the enemy dead, and the Dogsheads were climbing it. The men of Machran were dying where they stood, all training and drill forgotten. They were fighting for themselves, but conscious also that the gates were open wide at their backs, and the way into the city lay open.
They were building a new wall in front of the tall stone of the city, a breastwork of corpses.
The Dogsheads ascended it, their formation growing tighter as they closed ranks over their own dead. The weak winter sun was cut off, and Rictus found himself in shadow. He was inside the gateway itself, and the ancient gates of Machran loomed on either side of him like indifferent totems, their black oak now splashed red and glistening.
“One more!” Rictus shouted. “One more push, brothers!” and he felt behind him the surge of bodies, heard the animal roar of his men as they answered him.
“Form line on me!” Corvus cried. He held his lance up so the sunlight sparked off it, as though it had flashed out in white flame above his head. His white horsehair crest streamed behind him, and the black horse half-reared as he reined it in.
On either side of him the Companions formed up, wheeling in by centon, extending their ranks to left and right. They formed a line almost a pasang long, two ranks deep, the big horses sliding in next to one another foaming and snorting, their manes like black flags. The armour of their riders glittered as the winter clouds cleared and Araian looked down upon the battlefield.
Before them, the army of the League was closely engaged in the business of destroying the morai of Teresian and Demetrius. The right wing of the League was trying to wheel to meet the challenge of the bow-armed Companions that Corvus had dropped off to harass them, but the main body was committed wholly to the fight in front of it, a raging conflict of close-quarter spearwork.
The file closers at the rear of the line were turning around, and men were running up and down the back of the line frantically, warning their comrades of the sudden appearance of the Kefren cavalry, but the main body of the army was like a fighting dog in the pit, its jaws locked in its opponent’s throat. Only death would loosen that grip.
Corvus turned to Shoron. “Brother, sound me the charge.”
Shoron shared a look with Ardashir, wet his lips, closed his eyes, and put the horn to his mouth.
Clear and shrill over the battlefield the long ululation of the horn-call rang out; the shrill notes of the call to hunt, a sound heard on battlefields across the lands beyond the sea since the Empire had existed. Now it was ringing out in the heartland of the Macht.
The line of the Companions began to move, fourteen hundred brightly armoured riders on fourteen hundred tall black horses. They broke into a trot and then, as Corvus spurred his own mount, a canter.
The ground seemed to echo with the trembling impact of that mass of horseflesh, and the sound of it rose to challenge every other noise on the battlefield, to be heard even by Rictus and his men fighting in the gateway to the north.
It echoed across the earth. Druze heard it in the midst of the great slaughter at the east gate. It carried clear across the city, so that Sertorius and his men lifted their heads and paused a second to listen as they stood at the foot of the Kerusiad Hill. Kassia and Rian heard it as they stood upon the balcony from which Aise had leaped to her death, and peered out across the teeming bulk of Machran to the battling formations on the plain beyond the walls, wondering what it signified. It did not seem like a sound made by the agency of man. It sounded like the muttered anger of the gods.
The Companions broke into full, tearing gallop, and their lances came down, the wicked points held out at breast-height. Too late, the morai of the League realised what was thundering towards them from the south. Some managed to turn and present their spears; others simply stood and stared at that rolling mass of murder approaching, that black line of death.
The Companions smashed into the Macht battle-line with the impact of a flash-flood. The Niseians had been trained not to flinch from men, but to use their bulk, their iron-shod hooves, their teeth. They were warriors as much as the Kefren who rode them, and their sheer weight and momentum was irresistible.
The charge broke upon the rear of the League army like an apocalypse and broke clear through it, chopping the fighting centons of Avensis and Pontis to pieces.