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.
“Watch it, Tibold!” Harriet’s voice cut into the circuit. “The men you routed just ran into their reinforcements. You’ve got ten or twenty thousand fresh troops coming at you, and the survivors from the gates are rallying behind them!”
“Let them come!” the ex-Guardsman exulted. “We hold the gate now. They can’t keep us out, and I’ll take them in a straight fight any day, Lady Harry!”
“Sean, you’ve got more men coming at you, too,” Harriet warned.
“I see ’em, Harry.”
“Hang on, Lord Sean!” Tibold said urgently.
“We will,” Sean promised grimly, and opened his eyes. “Pass the word, Folmak. They’re coming in from the east and west.”
“What’s happening, Lord Marshal?” Vroxhan demanded edgily as a panting messenger handed Surak a message. The lord marshal scanned it, then crumpled it in his fist.
“The heretics have carried the gates, Holiness.”
“God will strengthen our men,” Vroxhan promised.
“I hope you’re right, Holiness,” Surak said grimly. “High-Captain Therah reports the heretics took at least two thousand casualties, and they’re still driving forward, not even pausing to regroup. It would seem,” he faced the high priest squarely, “their outrage at our treachery is even greater than I’d feared.”
“We acted in the name of God, Lord Marshal!” Vroxhan snapped. “Do not dare presume to question God’s will!”
“I didn’t question His will,” Surak said with dangerous emphasis. “I only observe that men enraged by betrayal can accomplish things other men cannot. Our losses will be heavy, Holiness.”
“Then they’ll be heavy!” Vroxhan glared at him, then slammed his fist on a map of the Temple with a snarl. “What of the heretic leaders?”
“A fresh attack is going in now, Holiness.”
The ordnance depot’s stone wall was for security, not serious defense. Two wide gateways pierced it to north and south, but Folmak’s men had loopholed the wall, barricaded the gates with paving stones and artillery limbers, and wheeled captured arlaks into place to fire out them. It wasn’t much of a fort, but it was infinitely preferable to trying to stand in the streets or squares of the city.
The surviving Guardsmen of the original ambush surrounded the depot, reinforced by several thousand more men and four batteries of arlaks. Now their guns moved up along side streets that couldn’t be engaged from the gateways. The Guard’s gunners had learned what happened to artillerists who unlimbered in range of rifles, and they dragged their batteries into the warehouses that flanked the depot. Hammers and axes smashed crude gunports in warehouse walls, and arlak muzzles thrust out through them.
Sean saw it coming, but there was nothing he could do to prevent it. Ammunition parties had hauled cases of Guard musket balls out of the depot and issued them to his men, who had orders to use the smoothbore ammunition for close range fighting and conserve their rifle ammunition, and he stood in a window of the depot commander’s office and watched stone dust and wooden splinters fly from the warehouse walls as picked marksmen fired on the small targets the improvised gunports offered. Some of their shots were going home, and no doubt at least a few were actually hitting someone, but not enough to stop the enemy’s preparations.