He jerked in pain as the "com" on his wrist suddenly bit him. He snatched his hand up in front of him, staring at the bracelet, and the Angel Harry's taut voice came from it.
"The middle gate must be down, Tibold! We can see shot coming through the innermost ones, and they're hanging by a thread!"
See them? How could even an angel see—? He bit off the extraneous question and held the com to his lips.
"What else can you see, Lady Harry?" he demanded.
"They've got a line of infantry waiting for you." Harriet deliberately spoke in a flat, clear voice despite her fear for Sean while she relayed the reports from Brashan's hastily redeployed orbital arrays. "It looks like two or three thousand pikes, but only a few hundred musketeers. They've brought up a battery—we can't tell if they're chagors or arlaks—in support. That's all so far, but more guns and men will be there within twenty minutes. If you're going, you have to go now, Tibold!"
The head of Tibold's column was the Twelfth Brigade. Its men stood two hundred meters behind their own guns, and they were white-faced and taut, for they understood the carnage waiting in and beyond that narrow tunnel. There were none of the usual jokes and anxious banter men used to hide their fear from one another. This time they stood silent, each man isolated in his own small world of gnawing tension despite the men standing at his shoulders. The thunder of their own guns pulsed in their blood like the beating of someone else's heart, and already they had over a hundred dead and wounded from the arlaks on the Temple's wall. They were too far out for grapeshot, and the defenders had been concentrating on efforts to silence Tibold's artillery, but that was going to change the instant the infantry started forward.
Their heads jerked up as High-Captain Tibold appeared before them. He faced them with blazing eyes, and his leather-lunged bellow cut through even the thunder of the guns.
"Malagorans!" he shouted. "You know all Lord Sean and the angels have done for us; now he, Lord Tamman, and the Angel Sandy have been betrayed! Unless we cut our way to them, they, and all our comrades with them, will die! Men of the Twelfth, will you let that happen?"
"NOOO!" the Twelfth roared, and Tibold drew his sword.
"Then let's go get them out! Twelfth Brigade, at a walk, advance!"
Whistles shrilled, pipes began to wail, and the men of the Twelfth gripped their rifles in sweat-slick hands and moved forward.
The artillerists on the walls didn't notice them at first. Smoke clogged visibility, and the thunder of their own guns covered the whistles and the drone of the pipes. But the Malagoran arlaks had to check fire as the advancing infantry masked their fire, and the Guard knew then. Powder-grimed gunners relaid their pieces, grapeshot replaced round, and they waited for the smoke to lift and give them a target.
"Double time!" the Twelfth's officers screamed, and the column picked up speed. They had six hundred paces to go, and they moved forward at a hundred and thirty paces a minute as the wind parted the smoke.
The defenders watched them come, and musketeers dashed along the wall, spreading out between the guns. The Guard didn't have many of them left, but four hundred settled into firing position and checked their priming as the Twelfth's advance accelerated. Six hundred paces. Five hundred. Four.
"Malagor and Lord Sean!" the Twelfth's commander bellowed, and his men howled the high, terrible Malagoran yell and sprang into a full run.
A curtain of flame blasted out from the wall, twenty guns spewing grapeshot into a packed formation at a range of barely three hundred meters. Hundreds of men went down as quarter-kilo buckshot smashed through them, but other men hurdled their shattered bodies at a dead run, and their speed took them in under the artillery's maximum depression before the gunners could reload. Guard musketeers leaned out over the parapet, exposing themselves to fire straight down into them as they reached the base of the wall, and the artillery poured fresh fire into the men behind them, but six full regiments of riflemen laced the battlements with suppressive fire. Scores of Guard musketeers died, and artillerists began to fall, as well, as bullets swept their embrasures. Fresh smoke turned morning into Hell's own twilight, men screamed and cursed and died, and the Twelfth Brigade's bleeding battalions slammed into the shot-riddled outer gate.
Massive, broken timbers collapsed under the impact of hurtling bodies and plunged downward, crushing dozens of men and pinning others, but the Twelfth lunged onward. There was no blazing oil from the murder holes, but Guardsmen fired joharns and pistols through them into the reeking, smoke-filled horror of the tunnel. The second gate still stood precariously, too riddled to last but enough to slow the Twelfth's headlong pace for just a moment, and another ninety men were piled dead before it when it finally went down.
The Twelfth drove onward, carried by a blood-mad fury beyond sanity and driven by the weight of numbers behind them, and a storm of musket fire met them as they slammed through the third and final gate at last. Arlaks bellowed, blasting them with case shot at less than sixty meters, and men slipped and fell on blood-slick stone as the brigade broke out into the open. Men fired their rifles on the run, still charging forward, and slammed into the waiting pikes like a bleeding, dying hammer.
The impact staggered the Guardsmen. Their longer weapons gave them a tremendous advantage in this headlong clash, but the Malagorans rammed onward, and more and more of them swept out of the tunnel. They overwhelmed the front ranks of pikes, burying them under their own bodies, and the Guard gave back—first one step, then another—before the stunning ferocity of that charge. They weren't fighting men; they were fighting an elemental force. For every Malagoran they killed, two more surged forward, and every one of those charging maniacs fired at pointblank range before he closed with the bayonet. Behind them, other men with lengths of burning slow match lit fuses, and powder-filled, iron hand grenades arced through the smoky air to burst amid the Guard's ranks. Here and there, their front broke, and Malagorans funneled forward into the holes, bayonets stabbing, taking men in the flank even as the Guard's charging reserve cut them down in turn. There was no end to the flood of howling heretics, and Guardsmen began to look over their shoulders for the reinforcements they'd been promised.
More Malagorans charged through the gate tunnel, and still more. The space between the wall and the pikes was a solid mass of men, each fighting to get forward to kill at least one Guardsman before he died. The casualty count was overwhelmingly in the Guard's favor, but the Malagorans seemed willing to take any losses, and at last, slowly, the pikes began to crumble. Here a man went down screaming; there another began to edge back; to one side, another dropped his pike and turned to run; and the Malagorans drove forward with renewed ferocity as they sensed the shifting tide.
The Guard's officers did everything mortal men could do, but mortal men couldn't stop that frenzied charge, and what had begun slowly spread and accelerated. A stubborn withdrawal became first a retreat, then a rout, and the Malagorans swarmed over any man who tried to stand while others fought their way meter by bloody meter up the stairs on the wall's inner face. The last of the pikemen, abandoned by their fellows, turned to run, and the baying Malagoran army swept into the city.
Two hundred of the Twelfth Brigade were still on their feet to join it.
"We're through the gate, Lord Sean!" Tibold shouted into the com. "We're through the gate!"
"I know, Tibold." Sean closed his eyes, and tears streaked his face, for he was tied into Brashan's orbital arrays. The smoke and chaos made it impossible to sort out details from orbit, even for Imperial optics, but he didn't need details to know thousands of his men lay dead or wounded.