The high priest began a hot reply, then strangled it stillborn. He could deal with Surak’s insolence later; for now, he needed this man.
“Very well, I stand rebuked. But what happened to the attack in the Place of Martyrs?”
“Somehow the heretics realized what was coming. Something must have warned them only after they entered the city, or they simply wouldn’t have come, but they guessed in time to form battle-lines before our pikes could hit them. As for what happened then, you saw as well as I, I’m sure, Holiness. No other army on Pardal could have produced that much fire; our men never expected anything like it, and they broke. I estimate,” he added bitterly, “that close to half of them were killed or wounded first.”
“And now?”
“Now we have them penned up in the Tanners Street ordnance depot.” The lord marshal grimaced. “That, unfortunately, means they now have plenty of ammunition when their own runs out, but we control all the streets between them and the gates. Their musketry won’t help them much in a street fight, and we can starve them out, if we must. Assuming we have time.”
“Time?” Vroxhan repeated sharply, and Surak nodded grimly.
“The rest of their army’s about to assault North Gate, Holiness, and at your orders, we didn’t tell the men on the wall what we intended, either.”
“You mean they may actually break into the Temple?!” Vroxhan gasped.
“I mean, Holiness, that our guns are manned and we’re rushing in more infantry, but if they hit fast enough, they may get through the tunnel before we can ready the oil. If that happens, then, yes, they can break in.”
“Dear God!” Vroxhan whispered, and it was the lord marshal’s turn to smile. It was a grim smile, but it wasn’t defeated.
“Holiness, I would never have chosen to fight them here, but it may actually work in our favor.” Vroxhan looked at him in disbelief, and the lord marshal made an impatient gesture. “Holiness, I’ve told you again and again: it’s their range and firepower that makes them so dangerous in the field. Well, there’s no open terrain in the Temple. The streets will break up their firing lines, every building will become a strong point, and they’ll have to come at us head-on, with bayonets against our pikes. This may be the best chance we’ll ever have to crush their main field army, and if we do, we can capture their weapons and find out how they’ve improved their range and rates of fire.”
Vroxhan blinked, and then his face smoothed as understanding struck.
“Exactly, Holiness. If we hold them here, smash this army, copy their weapons, and then concentrate our own strength from other areas, we can win this war after all.”
“I—” Vroxhan began, then stiffened at the sudden, brazen bellow of far more artillery than North Gate’s defenders could bring to bear.
A wall of smoke spewed upward as the arlaks recoiled, and splinters flew as their shot smashed into the city gates. Scores of holes appeared in the stout timbers, but they held, and the gunners sprang into the deadly ballet Lord Sean and Lord Tamman had taught them. Sponges hissed down bores, bagged charges and fresh shot followed, and the guns roared again.
The defending artillery fired in desperate counterbattery, but fewer guns could be crammed in along the walls, they couldn’t match the Malagorans’ rate of fire, and the wind carried the thick clouds of smoke up towards them in a solid, blinding bank. The Guard’s guns could kill and maim Tibold’s gunners, but they couldn’t silence his pieces, and the gates sagged as hurricanes of eight-kilo shot smashed them. The outermost portcullis and gate went down in ruins, but the gunners went on firing, pouring a maelstrom of shot down the narrow gullet of the gate tunnel. Tibold could no more see what was happening to the second and third gates than the next man, but that massive barrage had to be ripping them apart in turn.
He paced back and forth, gnawing his lip and trying to gauge his moment. If he waited too long, the defenders would be ready to deluge his men with oil; if he committed his column too soon, it would find itself halted by intact gates, and aside from hastily impressed wagon tongues, it had no battering rams. The losses he was going to take from the wall’s artillery as he charged would be terrible; if his men had to retreat under fire from a gate they couldn’t breach, they would also be useless.
Another salvo rolled out from his gun line, and another. Another. He paced harder, hovering on the brink of committing himself and then dragging himself back. He had to wait. Wait as long as he dared to be sure—
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.