“But—”
Marhn whirled away with a snarl of disgust just as Captain Urthank, his own second-in-command charged up, still buckling his armor.
“What—?” Urthank started, but Marhn cut him off with a savage wave.
“Somehow the demon-worshipers got ’round behind us. They’ve taken the bridges, and they’re advancing fast.” Urthank paled, and Marhn shook his head. “Get back there. Send in the Ninth and Eighteenth Pikes. You won’t be able to hold, but slow them up enough to buy me some time!”
“Yes, Sir!” Urthank saluted and disappeared, and Marhn began bellowing orders to a flock of messengers.
The Ninth Pikes thudded through the mud towards the clamor in their rear, and their eyes were wild. There’d been no time for their officers to explain fully, but the Ninth were veterans. They knew what would happen if the heretics weren’t stopped.
The Eighteenth turned up on their left, and whistles shrilled as their officers brought them to a slithering, panting halt. A forest of five-meter pikes snapped into fighting position, and eight thousand men settled into formation as the wailing Malagoran pipes swept down upon them.
Folmak reined in so violently his branahlk skidded on its haunches as the Guard phalanx materialized out of the rain. Lord Sean had warned him the surprise wouldn’t last, and he’d managed—somehow—to keep his men together as they swept across the Guard’s rear areas. The clutter of tents and wagons and lean-tos had made it hard, yet he’d kept his brigade in hand, and he felt a stab of thankfulness that he had.
But he was also well out in front, and half his third regiment had been left behind to hold the bridges. He had little more than fifteen hundred men, barely a sixth of the numbers suddenly drawn up across his front, and not a single pike among them.
That phalanx wouldn’t stop the regiments coming up behind him, but he couldn’t let them stop him, either. If the Guard realized how outnumbered its attackers were and won time to recover, it had more than enough power to crush Lord Sean’s entire force.
“First Battalion—action front!” he screamed, and whistles shrilled.
His men responded instantly. First Battalion of Second Regiment, his leading formation, deployed into firing line on the run, and the officer commanding the Guard pikes hesitated. All he knew was that his position was under attack, and the visibility was so bad he couldn’t begin to estimate Folmak’s numbers. Rather than charge forward in ignorance, he paused, trying to get some idea of what he was up against, and that hesitation gave First Battalion time to deploy in a two-deep firing line and the rest of Folmak’s men time to tighten their own formation behind them. It was still looser than it should have been, but Folmak sensed the firming resolution of his opponents. There was no time for further adjustment.
“Fire!” he bellowed.
Almost a third of the First’s rifles misfired, but there were three hundred of them. Two hundred-plus rifles blazed at less than a hundred meters’ range, and the Guardsmen recoiled in shock as, for the first time in Pardalian history, men with fixed bayonets poured fire into their opponents.
“At ’em, Malagorans!” Folmak howled. “Chaaaarge!”
The Guard formation wavered as the bullets slammed home. At such short range, a rifled joharn would penetrate five inches of solid wood, and a single shot could kill or maim two or even three men. The shock of receiving that fire was made even worse by the fact that it came from bayoneted weapons, and then, against every rule of warfare, musketeers actually charged pikemen!
The Guardsmen couldn’t believe it. Musketeers ran away from pikes—everyone knew that! But these musketeers were different. The column behind exploded through the firing line and hit the Eighteenth Pikes like a tidal bore. Dozens, scores of them, died on the bitter pikeheads, but while the Guardsmen were killing them, their companions hurled themselves in among the pikes, and the Guard discovered a lethal truth. Once a phalanx’s front was broken, once the Malagorans could get inside the pikes’ longer reach, bayoneted rifles were deadly melee weapons. They were shorter, lighter, faster, and these men knew how to use them to terrible effect.
“Drive ’em!” Folmak shrieked. “Drive ’em!” and First Brigade drove them. The Malagoran yell and the howl of their pipes carried them onward, and once they’d closed, they were more than a match for any pikemen.
Bayonets stabbed, men screamed and cursed and died, and mud-caked boots trod them into the mire. Folmak’s men stormed forward with a determination that had to be killed to be stopped, and the Guardsmen—shaken, confused, stunned by the impossibility of what was happening—were no match for them.
The Eighteenth broke. Those of its men who tried to stand paid for their discipline, for they couldn’t break free, couldn’t get far enough away to use their longer weapons effectively, and First Brigade swarmed them under like seldahks. Six minutes after that first volley had exploded in their faces, the Eighteenth Pikes were a shattered, fleeing wreck, and Folmak swung in on the flank of the Ninth.
Even now, he was outnumbered by better than two-to-one, and the melee with the Eighteenth had disordered his ranks. Worse, the Ninth was made of sterner stuff, and its commander had managed to change front while the Eighteenth was dying. His men were still off balance, but they howled their own war cries and lunged forward, slamming into Folmak’s brigade like a hammer, and this time they hadn’t been shaken by a pointblank volley.
Folmak’s lead battalion had already been more than decimated. Now it reeled back, fighting stubbornly but driven by the longer, heavier weapons of its foes, and the officers of both sides lost control. It was one howling vortex, sucking in men and spitting out corpses, and then, suddenly, Sean’s Sixth Brigade slammed into the Ninth from the other side.
It was too much, and the Guardsmen came apart. Unit organization disintegrated. Half the Ninth simply disappeared, killed or routed, and the other half found itself surrounded by twice its own number of Malagorans. They tried to fight their way out, then tried to form a defensive hedgehog, but it was useless. Despite the rain, scores of riflemen still managed to reload and fire into them, and even as they died, more Malagoran regiments rushed past. They weren’t even slowing the enemy down, and their surviving officers ordered them to throw down their weapons to save as many of their men as they could.
High-Captain Marhn’s face was iron as more and more reports of disaster came in. The heretics had swept over the entire bivouac area, then paused to reorganize and fanned out in half a dozen columns, each storming forward towards the rear of the entrenchments. A third of his men had already been broken, and the panicky wreckage of shattered formations boiled in confusion, hampering their fellows far more than their enemies. The last light was going, and the Host’s entire encampment had disintegrated into a rain-soaked, mud-caked madness no man could control.
He had no idea how many men the heretics had. From the terrified reports, they might have had a million. Worse, the units they were hitting were his worst-armed, weakest ones, the men who’d been reformed out of the ruin of Yortown. They’d been placed in reserve because their officers were still trying to rebuild them into effective fighting forces, and the demon-worshipers were cutting through them like an ax, not a knife.
He clenched his jaw and turned his back, shutting out the confused reports while he tried to find an answer. But there was only one, and it might already be too late for it to work.