Marcus barked a laugh. “That ought to keep them busy for a few days.”
“What if the deputies agree to the surrender?” Fitz said.
“The deputies,” Marcus explained, “can’t agree on anything.”
“It may buy us a brief respite,” Janus said, opening the carriage door. “Let’s see what we can do with it.”
“This isn’t the lot, surely,” Marcus said, looking out at the drilling recruits.
“No, sir,” Fitz said. “We’ve made our main camp at Ohnlei. Plenty of space in the gardens there for drills, and it’s good to get the volunteers out of the city. Keeps them from wandering off at night. But the colonel requested that we have a company or two take their instruction here in the Triumph so that everyone could see what it was like. It might encourage a few more to sign up.”
“They’ve certainly got an audience,” Marcus said. “But I’m not sure it’s going to convince anyone.”
A stream of blistering curses drifted up from one of the Colonial sergeants, in a mixture of Vordanai and Khandarai. The foreign obscenities seemed to make quite an impression, and there was even scattered applause from the onlookers. The recruits were in two long lines, about a hundred men in all, ununiformed but sporting army-pattern muskets. They were being attended to by two blue-coated sergeants, one of whom called out the stages of the Manual of Arms while the other prowled the ranks, looking for shirkers.
It took Marcus back in time, not even to Khandar, but to his childhood. None of the boys who went to the War College were going to be rankers, but the instructors considered it important that the future officers understand what it was they were ordering their men to do. So the first three months of every cadet’s instruction had been identical to what a newly arrived ranker would get in one of the army training camps, albeit with a bit more attention to the niceties and less summary corporal punishment. Marcus remembered long afternoons in the sun, miming the steps to load, ready, level, and fire until his arm went numb.
He’d been sixteen, younger than most of the boys here in the square, but he thought that he and his classmates had caught on faster. Though I suppose they’ve only been at it a few hours. And having half of Vordan City staring at them can’t help their concentration.
Janus was watching the drilling men from beside the coach. Fitz had wandered over to exchange a few words with one of the sergeants, and Marcus had followed him. Now they stood together, but once again Marcus had the feeling of being apart, separated from the unit that had been the only family he had for all of his adult life. He cleared his throat.
“Yes, sir?” Fitz said. He hadn’t lost his knack of picking up on Marcus’ tiniest hints.
“How many new men have you got in total?”
“I don’t have the latest counts. They’re still trickling in, and the sergeants are culling out those who won’t be able to fight. But I’d guess we’ll end up with at least six thousand.”
Marcus raised his eyebrows. In one sense, that felt like an enormous number-more men than the Colonials had ever had at any one time. On the other hand, only six thousand came forward, out of how many hundreds of thousands in the city? He shook his head. We work with what we have.
“Have you got six thousand muskets?”
“No, sir,” said Fitz. “We brought about two thousand spare up the river with us, mostly captured from the Auxiliary’s armory in Ashe-Katarion. Mor has been working to scrounge up whatever he can find here. There’s the stocks of the Armsmen and the palace guards at Ohnlei, but unfortunately it looks like this Peddoc already stripped those pretty clean. The colonel pointed us to a few private sources, but Mor doesn’t think they’ll amount to more than another thousand. Plenty of powder, though, and we’ve got men working on making cartridges.”
“What about the other half of the recruits?”
“We’re giving them pikes. I don’t know if it’ll be worth anything, but. .” He flicked his eyes at Janus. “I think the colonel has a plan.”
“I’m sure he does.”
“You see how we’ve got them doing the Manual of Arms before anything else?”
“Yes.” Marcus frowned. “That is odd. When I was at the College, we started with formations and marching.”
Fitz nodded. “Colonel’s explicit orders. When I asked why, he said that we might be able to teach them to shoot a musket in a few days, but we haven’t got a chance of getting them to march straight, so we shouldn’t bother to try. I can’t say that I disagree, but I still don’t follow his reasoning.”
“The joys of serving under Janus bet Vhalnich,” Marcus said, carefully under his breath.
Saints and martyrs. Pikes and men who can’t march. He tried to imagine being on the battlefield with a pike-little more than a long pole with a spiked blade at one end. The boom of guns, the rattle of musketry, smoke and flashes everywhere, men falling in screams and blood. And you out there with a pointy stick, like it was two hundred years ago.
And as for marching, any infantry that couldn’t reliably form square would be decimated if it was caught in the open by enemy cavalry. At least one cavalry regiment had been quartered at Midvale, he knew, and Orlanko might have been able to scrape together more.
“Hell,” he said aloud. “I hope he’s got a good plan.”
“We’ll get through it, sir. The Colonials have faced worse odds than this.”
Marcus winced. The sentiment was well meant, but the last time they’d faced well-equipped troops, it had been General Khtoba’s Auxiliaries. That engagement had cost the lives of hundreds of men, and it had cost Adrecht-Marcus’ best friend-his arm, and possibly his sanity as well. Let’s hope we do better this time.
“Very good, Captain,” Janus said, coming over to the two of them. “I want you to take them to live rounds as soon as you feel they’re ready. Every man should feel the kick of his weapon before he takes it into battle, and I don’t know how much time the duke will give us.”
“Understood, sir.” Fitz saluted.
“I’m going to look in on things at Ohnlei,” Janus went on. “Fitz, I’ll need you with me. Marcus, I’d like you to check in with our artillery contingent and see how things are progressing.”
“Understood, sir,” Marcus said, with a salute of his own. He was relieved to be assigned a definite task. “Where can I find them?”
“Captain Vahkerson is at the University, working with the crews. Captain Solwen is looking for tubes, so he’ll be out in the city, but I imagine Captain Vahkerson will know where to find him.”
“Yes, sir. Anywhere in particular at the University? It’s a big campus, if I recall.”
Janus’ smile flashed across his face. “You can just follow the noise, I expect.”
Boom. It was odd how the sound of a gun going off changed as you got closer to it. At a distance, only the bass thump of it was clear, like thunder growling far away. As you got nearer, the higher tones became audible, until it was a full-throated bang that resonated at the back of your teeth and in the pit of your stomach. And when you thought it was so loud you must be nearly on top of it, you found that you were still a couple of hundred yards off. Get closer and it grew louder still, until your ears rang like cymbals in the silence that followed each detonation.
Marcus was able to find the Preacher, not only by walking toward the booms but by following the crowds of curious, nervous University students. They looked very somber in their black scholar’s robes. Most of them were young men, but there were a few older students and even a couple of women among them.