And then the arlaks began to bark.
Eight-kilo balls fired at less than sixty meters slammed into the depot wall, and it had never been meant to resist artillery. Lumps of rock flew, and he clenched his jaw.
“They’re going to blow breaches, then put in the pikes,” he told Folmak harshly. “Start a couple of companies building barricades behind the wall. Use whatever they can find, and see about parking some more arlaks among them. We’ll let them blow their breach, then open up when they come through.”
“At once, Lord Sean!” Folmak slapped his breastplate and vanished, and Sandy crossed to Sean.
“I wish to hell you hadn’t come,” he rasped. “Goddamn it, what did you think you were doing?”
“Saving your butt, among other things!” she shot back, but her words lacked their usual tartness, and she touched his elbow. “How bad is it, Sean?” she asked in a softer voice. “Can we hold?”
“No,” he said flatly. “They’ll just keep throwing men at us—or stand back and batter us with artillery. Sooner or later, the First is going down.”
“Unless Tibold gets here first,” she said through the thunder of the guns.
“Unless Tibold gets here first,” he agreed grimly.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Case shot screamed down the street as the Malagoran chagors recoiled, and High-Captain Therah winced as it scythed through his men. Teams of heretic infantry had hauled the light guns forward, and if their shot was only half as heavy as the Guard’s arlaks threw, the smaller, lighter chagors were also far more maneuverable. Worse, the heretics could fire with impossible speed—faster than a Guard musketeer!—and the deadly guns had cost Therah’s men dearly.
He still didn’t know what had happened, but the heretics’ conviction that any treachery had been the Temple’s lent them a furious, driving power Therah had never faced in seven long Pardalian years as a soldier. Half of them were screaming “Lord Sean and no quarter!” as they charged, and all of them were fighting like the very demons they worshiped. By his most optimistic estimate, the Guard had already lost six or seven thousand men, and there was no end in sight. But the heretics were paying, too, for their fury drove them into headlong, battering attacks.
Which didn’t mean they weren’t winning. His men knew the city better than they, yet somehow they spotted every major flanking move. Smaller parties seemed able to evade their attention and hit their flanks out of alleys and side streets, yet such piecemeal attacks could only slow them, and the hordes of terrified civilians choking the streets shackled his own movements.
But he was learning, too, he thought grimly. His musketeers were no match for heretic riflemen in the open, so every precious musket was dug into the taller buildings along the heretics’ line of advance. Their slower-firing smoothbores were just as deadly at close range, and their firing positions at second- and third-story loopholes shielded them from return fire. Therah was positive the heretics’ losses were far higher than his own, yet still they drove forward, flowing down every side street, spreading out at every intersection. They bored ever deeper into the Temple, like a holocaust, and as the conflict spread, it grew harder and harder to control it or even grasp what was going on.
The chagors fired another salvo, and then the heretic infantry charged with their terrible, baying war cry. Their accursed pipes shrilled like damned souls, and their bayonets cut through the staggered ranks of his surviving pikemen. The heretics howled in triumph—and then their howls were drowned by the roar of arlaks. The pikes had held just long enough for the artillerists behind them to complete their chest-high barricade of paving stones, and the guns spewed flame through gaps in the crude barrier. Grape shot splashed walls and pavement with blood, and not even demon-worshipers could stand that fire. They fell back, running for their own guns, and a bitter duel sprang up between their chagors and the Guard arlaks. Field pieces thundered at one another at a range of no more than eighty paces, straight down the broad avenue of the North Way, and Therah turned away from the window to glare down at his map.
The heretic point was halfway to the Place of Martyrs, but he could hold. He knew he could. Their casualties were even greater than his, and, aside from the North Way itself, he’d stopped their advance along most of the main avenues within three or four thousand paces of North Gate. Now his guns were dug in across the North Way, and if he didn’t expect them to hold for long, successive positions were being built behind them. He could bleed the heretics to death as they battered their way through one strongpoint after another, but only if he had more men!
It was the side streets. His strength was being eaten up in scores of small blocking forces, racing to cut off each new penetration. Every man he committed to holding them there was one less to cover the main thoroughfares, but if he didn’t block the side routes, the heretics filtered forward—taking their accursed chagors with them—and cut in behind his main positions. He needed more men, yet Lord Marshal Surak refused to release them. A full third of the available Guard was still hammering away at the heretics’ leaders or covering routes they might use to join their fellows if they somehow broke out of the artillery depot. The men Therah did have were fighting like heroes, but something was going to break if he couldn’t convince Surak to reinforce him.
“Signalman!” He didn’t even look up as a signals officer materialized beside him. “Signal to Lord Marshal Surak: ‘I must have more men. We hold the main approaches, but the demon-worshipers are breaking through the side streets. Losses are heavy. Unless reinforced, I cannot be responsible for the consequences.’ ” He paused, wondering if he’d been too direct, then shrugged. “Send it.”
He looked back out the window just as a ball from a heretic chagor struck an arlak on the muzzle. The gun tube leapt into the air like a clumsy talmahk, then crashed back down to crush half a dozen men, and he swore. His gunners were killing the heretic artillerists, but despite their barricade, they were being ground away by the demon-worshipers’ greater rate of fire.
“Message to Under-Captain Reskah! He’s to move his battery up to Saint Halmath Street. Have him deploy to take the heretics in flank as they advance on the Street of Lamps position. Then get another messenger to Under-Captain Gartha. He’s to bring his pikes—”
High-Captain Therah went on barking orders even as his staff began to gather up their maps in preparation to fall back yet again.
Sean crouched behind his own rock pile with Sandy as the latest assault fell back into the smoke. The depot wall had become little more than a tumbled heap of broken stone, but his men were dug in behind it, and dead and dying Guardsmen littered the approaches. The wooden warehouses to the east were a roaring mass of flames, but the ones on the west side were stone, and the Guard arlaks in them were still in action.
Folmak crawled up beside him, keeping low as musket balls whined and skipped from the crude breastwork. The ex-miller’s breastplate was dented, and his left arm hung in a bloody sling, but he carried a smoking pistol in his right hand. He flopped down beside Sean and passed the weapon back to his orderly to reload before he tugged a replacement from his sash.