Taniel had never been all that good with a short sword. He was fast and competent, but if this creature had any amount of training, he’d cut right through Taniel.
Taniel caught one thrust and pushed the Warden’s sword to one side. The Warden bridged the gap with his other fist. Taniel was ready for it.
He caught the Warden’s fist and slammed his forehead against the Warden’s nose. He could feel the bone move back into the creature’s brain. That alone should have killed it, but Taniel still felt struggle in the Warden’s muscles. Taniel stepped back and slashed across the Warden’s throat. It gurgled and collapsed, clinging to life, but it wouldn’t be any more of a problem.
Taniel could feel the Warden’s black, sticky blood all across his face.
“Oi!” Someone called from the earthworks above him. “They’re coming!”
Taniel realized with a start that the rest of the Kez army was almost upon him. He snatched his rifle and scrambled up the earthworks, kicking dirt and swearing. The Warden had made it look easy. It most certainly wasn’t.
Several hands helped pull Taniel to the relative safety of the earthworks, then thumped him on the back.
“Back to the line!” someone shouted.
Taniel shook his head, resting for a moment on the earthworks barricade. He clutched his rifle to his chest to keep his hands from shaking, and wondered if going over the earthworks like that had been a mistake.
Someone smacked him across the face. He half expected it to be Ka-poel, but when he lifted his eyes, he recognized Major Doravir. She looked furious.
“Do you have a death wish, Captain?” She grabbed him by the collar, shaking him like an errant schoolboy. “Well, do you? No one goes over that embankment without orders. No one!”
“Piss on your orders!”
Taniel shoved her away. He might have put his bayonet through her chest if he’d had any less control over himself.
She stared at him, a cold rage in her eyes. “I’ll see you hanged, Captain.”
“Try it.”
“Load,” came an officer’s call. Taniel took a moment to orient himself. From the high earthworks he could see up and down the jagged line. Wardens were fighting behind the earthworks, clearing out whole groups of men, but the two he’d killed seemed to have tipped things in Adro’s favor in the immediate vicinity. Soldiers bent to reload their rifles, readying for the Kez onslaught.
Taniel turned away from Doravir and stuffed a bullet down his rifle. Out of the corner of his eye he watched her storm away, yelling orders.
“Careful, Captain,” a nearby soldier whispered. “If that one turns her eyes on you, she’ll sleep with you or see you dead. Or both.”
“She can go to the pit, for all I care.”
“She’s General Ket’s sister,” the soldier said. “She does what she wants. But she’s a damned good officer. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”
Ket’s sister. That’s why he thought he’d seen Ket more recently. The resemblance was strong, even if Doravir had a thinner build. “A damned good officer would let me do my job,” Taniel said. He dropped a second bullet down his rifle and secured it with a scrap of cloth.
The soldier stared at him. “You feeling all right, Captain? You just loaded that twice, and without powder.”
“Ask yourself,” Taniel said with confidence he didn’t feel, “what type of a man would leap the earthworks and go fight two Wardens by himself, then load his rifle without powder.” He licked the powder off his fingers to keep the edge on his powder trance, and set the rifle against his shoulder. He sighted along the barrel. The Kez front line was still some two hundred yards distant. Well out of range of the muskets, while the Adran riflemen would open fire any moment.
Taniel found a pair of officers well back from the line and squeezed the trigger. He floated the two bullets simultaneously, pushing them toward their respective targets.
He caught one of the officers in the chest. The man clutched at the wound and slumped in his saddle, causing panic in his bodyguard. Taniel winced. The other bullet had missed the target. How could he be missing? Had the mala made him lose his edge?
“Kresimir be damned,” the soldier beside him said. “You’re Taniel Two-Shot. Hey” – he tapped the man beside him on the shoulder – “This is Taniel Two-Shot.”
“Yeah,” the other soldier responded, “and I’m a general.”
“He was just down in front of the barricade. Took on four Wardens all by himself.”
“Nah.”
“Saw it with my own eyes.”
“Sure you did.”
Taniel focused on the Kez lines. The rat-tat-tatting of their snares seemed to echo in his brain. He opened his third eye for a moment, watching as the earth was bathed in glowing pastels, splashes of sorcery covering every part of the battlefield.
“You ready to die with us, Two-Shot?” the second soldier asked, breaking Taniel’s concentration. It wasn’t phrased as a threat. Just a question.
“No, not particularly.”
“We’ve been falling back every day. Sometimes twice. Every time the damned Kez advance like this. And each time, we lose three hundred men or more.”
Taniel couldn’t believe that. “Every time?”
The man nodded solemnly.
“Falling back…” Taniel craned his neck. The artillery had been wheeled away by now, back to the next row of trenches and earthen barricades. “Stupid bloody fools. We have to hold. We can’t let them push us back like this. We’re practically hemorrhaging troops.”
“I don’t know what an ‘hemorg’ is, but we’re bleedin’ men something fierce. We can’t hold. We tried, but can’t. Nothing stops those Black Wardens. No matter how many we kill, there seems to be more.”
“You’re awfully calm,” Taniel said.
“Something peaceful about that, I think. Knowing you’re going to die. That lad over on your other side–”
Taniel took a glance. The kid next to him didn’t seem old enough to shave. His hands shook so hard his musket was swaying from side to side.
“–that lad doesn’t have the same opinion I do.”
“It’s just the jitters,” Taniel said. “We all get them.” Taniel glanced at the Kez. A hundred and fifty yards. He reloaded his rifle, lifted it to his shoulder, and fired.
“Not you,” the first soldier said. “I heard you put a round in a Privileged’s eye for your first kill.”
“That I did. But I learned to shoot from Field Marshal Tamas himself.” He paused. “They teach you to shoot at targets,” he said to the young man beside him. “It’s different when you realize there’s a man on the other end, shooting back at you. I was sitting two miles away. I had surprise on my side. But, lad, you take a deep breath and pull that trigger. Fire straight and true, because you might not get another shot.”
“Lad,” Taniel had said. The boy was no more than five years his junior.
Taniel loaded his rifle while he spoke, set, and fired. Another officer dropped.
The boy looked at Taniel. His hands hadn’t stopped shaking.
“I don’t think your pep talk helped much,” the first soldier said.
“Quiet down on the line!” That was Major Doravir. She had her sword raised above her head, a pistol in the other hand. “Aim!”
The Kez were almost in musket range. There were thousands of them. Rank upon rank upon rank. Taniel could see now why it was impossible to hold the line. He remembered the Battle of South Pike and how they’d almost lost the bastion a dozen times. They’d been guarding a pass from an enchanted bulwark only a hundred paces wide. Here, with nothing but earthworks between them and the Kez, it would be next to impossible to hold.
“Fire!”
The front line and much of the second of the Kez offensive fell beneath the volley. The Adran infantry began to reload.
Before a second volley could be fired, the Kez lines came to a stop. The new front line dropped to their knees and lined up their shots before firing.
Taniel threw himself behind the safety of the earthworks. He pulled the young soldier down with him and listened to the volley, and then the thwap of musket balls ricocheting off the dirt. The young soldier struggled to get back up. Taniel held him down.