High-Captain Vrikadan’s branahlk jibed and fretted as ten thousand voices rose to join the thunder of the drums, and he turned in the saddle to study his men. The mighty hymn swelled around him, strong and deep, but the leading pike companies were tight-faced as they roared the words.
Vrikadan urged the branahlk closer to a battery of arlaks, creaking along between the columns. Even the stolid nioharqs were uneasy, tossing their tusks and lowing, and a gray-bearded artillery captain looked up and met his eye with a grim smile.
Tamman stood on the fighting step and watched the juggernaut of steel and flesh roll towards him. The rumble of its singing was a morale weapon whose potency he hadn’t really appreciated, but at least the Host was performing exactly as Tibold had predicted. So far.
Twenty thousand men marched towards the fords. As many more followed to exploit any success, and he felt very small and young. Worse, he sensed his men’s disquiet. It wasn’t even close to panic, but that hymn-roaring monster was enough to shake anyone, and he turned to his second-in-command.
“Let’s have a little music of our own, Lornar,” he suggested, and High-Captain Lornar grinned.
“At once, Lord Tamman!” He beckoned to a teenaged messenger, and the lad dashed back to the rear of the redoubt. There was a moment of muttered consultation, and then a high-pitched skirling. The Malagorans had invented the bagpipe, and Tamman’s troops looked at one another with bared teeth as the defiant wail of the pipes rose to meet the Guard.
God, I never realized how long it took! Sean made himself stand still, listening to the music swelling from the redoubts to answer the Guard’s singing, and felt sick and hollow, nerves stretched by the deliberation with which thousands of men marched towards death. This wasn’t like Israel’s frantic struggle against the quarantine system. This was slow and agonizing.
The range dropped inexorably, and he bit his lip as the first gouts of smoke erupted from the redoubts. Round shot ripped through the Guard’s ranks, dismembering and disemboweling, and his enhanced vision made the carnage too clear. He swallowed bile, but even as the guns fired the music of the pipes changed. It took on a new, fiercer rhythm, and he looked at Tibold.
“I haven’t heard that hymn before.”
“That’s no hymn,” Tibold said, and Sean raised an eyebrow. “That’s ‘Malagor the Free,’ Lord Sean,” the ex-Guardsman said softly.
Vrikadan heard the high, shivering seldahk’s howl of the Malagoran war cry—a terrifying sound which, like the music shrilling beneath it, had been proscribed on pain of death for almost two Pardalian centuries—but he had other things to worry about, and he fought his mount as a salvo of shot shrieked through his men. And another. Another! Dear God, where had they gotten all those guns?
A cyclone howled, and he kicked free of his stirrups as a round shot took his branahlk’s head. The beast dropped and its blood fountained over him, but he rolled upright and drew his sword. The range was too great for his own guns to affect earthworks, but he grabbed at the knee of a mounted aide.
“Unlimber the guns!” he snapped. “Get them into action now!”
Tamman coughed, watching one of his arlak crews as the reeking smoke rolled over him. A bagged charge slid down the muzzle while the captain stopped the vent with a leather thumbstall. The eight-kilo round shot followed, and the wad, and the crew heaved the piece back to battery as the captain cocked the lock and drove a priming quill down the vent to pierce the bag. The gun vomited flame and lurched back, a dripping sponge hissed into its maw, quenching the embers of the last shot, and a fresh charge was waiting.
He turned away, dazed by the bellow and roar and insane keening of the pipes, and his hands clenched on the earthen rampart as the lines of Guard musketeers parted to reveal the pikes and their own unlimbering guns.
Lord Rokas strained to pierce the smoke. The waves of fire washing along those redoubts was impossible. No one could fit that many guns into so small a space even if they had them, and the heretics couldn’t have that many!
But they did. Tongues of flame transfixed the pall, smashing tangles of bloody limbs through his advancing pikes. Vrikadan’s men were falling too quickly and too soon, and he turned to a signaler.
“Tell High-Captain Martas to tighten the interval. Then instruct High-Captain Sertal to advance.”
Signal flags snapped, and Rokas chewed his lip. He’d hoped Vrikadan would clear at least one ford, but that would take a special miracle against those guns. Yet his bleeding columns should cover Martas long enough for him to reach charge range of the river.
He raised his glass once more, cursing silently as his men entered grapeshot range and his estimate of Yortown’s cost rose.
Sandy MacMahan was white, and her brain screamed for her to arm her cutter’s weapons, but she couldn’t. She was sickened by how glibly she’d suggested taking part in this horror, yet stubborn rationality told her she’d been right—as Sean was right now. Imperial weapons could never be used if they couldn’t be used throughout, but logic and reason were cold, hateful companions as she watched the smoke and blood erupting below her.
High-Captain Vrikadan’s arlaks thundered. They were too distant to penetrate the earthen ramparts, but their crews heaved them further forwards with every shot, pounding away in a desperate effort to suppress the heretic guns.
They weren’t accomplishing much, Vrikadan knew, yet every little bit helped, and if they could dismount a few of those guns…
His northern column wavered, and Vrikadan charged through the smoke, bouncing off wounded men, beating at stragglers with the flat of his blade.
“Keep your ranks!” he bellowed. “Keep your ranks, damn you!”
A wild-eyed under-captain recognized him and wheeled on his own men, quelling their panic. Vrikadan shouldered up beside the younger man, waving his sword while the lead company of the stalled phalanx stared at him.
“With me, lads!” he screamed, and dashed forward like a man possessed.
Smoke blinded Tamman, and he switched his vision to thermal imaging. The image was blurry, and he could no longer see the range stakes, but a mass of men was almost to the east bank. He sent a runner forward.
Vrikadan’s lips drew back in a snarl as a ray of sunlight pierced the smoke and the river glistened before him. Grapeshot heaped his men in ugly, writhing tangles, but the weight of numbers behind them was an avalanche. They couldn’t stop—they couldn’t be stopped!—and the water beckoned.
And then, just as he reached the bank, the smoke lifted on a billow of flame. There were gun pits at the feet of the redoubts! Camouflaged pits filled not with arlaks but with chagors, light guns packed hub-to-hub and spewing fire.
He had only an instant to see it before a charge of grape ripped both legs off at the hip.
Sean swallowed again, cringing inwardly as he watched through Sandy’s scanners and saw the east bank of the Mortan writhe with screaming, broken bodies … and saw living men advancing through the horror.
God in Heaven, how could they do that? He knew the momentum of the men behind drove them forward, giving them no choice, but it was more than that, too. It was unreasoning, blood-mad insanity and it was courage, and there was no longer any difference between them.