He ordered another ten battalions forward, sending half of them around the battery in the centre of the dunes with orders to make for the extreme left of the enemy line. He hoped this would lead the enemy commander to assume he had learned his mistake and was attempting to probe for weaknesses elsewhere. As the second wave passed by the battery, suffering only marginally fewer casualties than the first from the enemy ships and cannon, he summoned the Greens forward. They had been kept a mile to the rear and well inland, beyond the sight of any reconnaissance. Sirus turned to watch them loping past his vantage point atop a hill a few hundred yards from the Sands. Every Green in the White’s thrall had been enlisted in this attack and they streamed past in a huge pack, every one carrying a Spoiled on its back.
Once the Greens were on the Sands Sirus ordered the Spoiled to the left of the battery into a dense formation ten ranks deep and sent them charging full pelt towards the enemy trenches. Rifle fire and repeating guns tore the first four ranks to pieces in short order, the Spoiled behind leaping their comrades’ bodies and keeping on, bayonet-tipped rifles gleaming in the two-moon night. The charge was doomed, of course, only the last rank of Spoiled reaching the trenches where they all fell in a brief but savage hand-to-hand struggle, a struggle that prevented the human defenders from noticing the huge pack of Spoiled-mounted Greens boiling across the dunes.
Some repeating guns managed to loose a hail of bullets into the onrushing mass of drakes, cutting down dozens in a matter of seconds, but the momentum of the charge proved unstoppable. The drakes tore through the trenches in a welter of fire, tooth and claw, the Spoiled on their backs leaping away as soon as they were clear of the Sands. They quickly formed into companies and launched an immediate attack on human defenders to their left. They had been ordered to concentrate on silencing the repeating guns and moved from trench to trench in relays, putting rifle and bayonet to murderously efficient use.
Gauging the moment had come, Sirus set the remaining battalions in motion, over one hundred thousand Spoiled starting forward at the run. A few battalions were sent into the teeth of the ship guns and cannon directly to their front, Sirus being keen to ensure the enemy commander didn’t have the chance to shift any forces. The bulk of the army veered to the west, keeping close to the river as they charged for the gap the Green cavalry had torn in the enemy line.
Wonderful. Catheline’s exultation and triumph sang in his head along with a not-inconsiderable measure of lust. How could I ever have doubted you?
The images captured by the thousands of eyes in the army played through their conjoined minds with nightmarish clarity. A Varestian continuing to swing his sabre despite the six bayonets that pinned him to the earth. A woman stumbling across the sand with her intestines trailing from a gaping stomach wound. A knot of defenders clustered around a repeating cannon, continuing to fire until the Greens closed in and bathed them in fire.
It was hard to make sense of the situation amidst so much horror but Sirus soon divined that the enemy had been engaged all along the line and the stocks of ammunition and reserves to their rear were also under attack.
Send the Reds, Catheline commanded, her thoughts riven with so much eagerness for the slaughter Sirus winced in pain. And the reserves. Finish it!
Not yet, he insisted. Resistance is still fierce. The Reds must be preserved for the pursuit.
He felt her gathering her will to override his objection, fed by the White’s vast need for vengeance, but the argument was rendered irrelevant when a blinding white light blossomed in the sky.
It hung in the air trailing sparks, casting its glow across the dunes. Flare, Sirus realised, his Spoiled eyes piercing the haze of light to make out the shape of the parachute above the blazing pyrotechnic. Two more blazed into light a split-second later, bathing the entire battlefield in a glow bright enough to banish all shadows. Sirus shielded his eyes, squinting as he focused on the black space beyond the flares, and was soon rewarded with the sight of a large, curved shape descending from the gloom.
The enemy’s airships had finally arrived.
CHAPTER 44
Lizanne
“Our lot are running,” Morva shouted, hair whipping in the wind as she leaned out of the Typhoon’s side hatch, peering through her goggles at the battlefield below. “Greens are everywhere.”
“Reds?” Lizanne shouted back.
“Not that I can see.”
Lizanne moved forward, making her way to Tekela’s side and telling the gunners manning the Growlers in the side hatches to get ready. “Give me one minute then take us lower,” she said. “Below two thousand feet.”
“That’s well within the ceiling for a Red,” Tekela pointed out.
“I know. But we need to make sure we drop in the right place.”
Lizanne injected a burst of Blue and quickly tranced with the Blood-blessed in the Tempest and the newly constructed Hurricane and Whirlwind, ordering them to follow the Typhoon. Slipping out of the trance, she gripped a handhold as Tekela put the aerostat into a steep dive.
“Reds ahead!” she called from the pilot’s seat, her voice soon drowned out by the roar of the Growlers. Lizanne moved to a window to watch the tracer bullets streaming into the gloom, the arcing streams soon bisected by the larger shells from the Thumpers carried by the Hurricane and the Whirlwind. These featured a new modification from Jermayah, a fuse that would cause them to explode after a distance of four hundred yards. Consequently, the sky surrounding the aerostats soon began to resemble a firework display. Lizanne saw Reds illuminated by the exploding shells, brief, frozen glimpses of the beasts banking and coughing flame, none of which came close to the aerostats. She had the satisfaction of counting four caught in the act of being blasted out of the sky before Tekela hauled back on the control lever and called out, “Nineteen hundred feet!”
“Slow and level!” Lizanne called back, moving to the apparatus newly fitted to the floor of the gondola. It was an uncomplicated contraption consisting of a telescope positioned vertically within a frame to which a small lever had been attached. The lever was connected to a taut steel cable that descended through the base of the gondola to the release mechanism below. Lizanne injected a one-second burst of Green and pressed her eye to the telescope, placing one hand on the lever. She tried to blot out the continuing roar of the guns, punctuated by a rich stream of profane fear and exhilaration from the gunners. The view through the telescope was chaotic at first, drifting smoke shrouding a landscape of numerous fires and the ant-like forms of running people. However, thanks to the Green she was able to ascertain that they were about to fly over the southern fringe of the Jet Sands.
Where are they? she thought as the landscape slid beneath, her concentration soon broken by a shout from Morva.