“One thing,” he said after a moment, his voice harsh. “Remember what’s waiting for anyone who surrenders. Remind the boys.” He met his officers’ eyes levelly, his own cold. “If anyone doesn’t think that’s the case, remind them of what happened to Colonel Suwail.”
Mahzyngail’s jaw tightened, and Fairstock’s eyes turned as cold as Mahldyn’s own.
Colonel Zhordyn Suwail and one company of the 93rd had marched to the relief of Cheraltyn. Suwail hadn’t realized the frantic message begging for help was a trap until he actually reached the town, at which point his four hundred men had been swarmed by an entire regiment of rebel militia and at least two hundred “irregulars.” They’d managed to form ranks before the attackers actually hit them, but they’d never had a chance against that sort of numbers. None of them had survived, and Mahldyn felt a renewed surge of hatred as he remembered the flayed and mutilated bodies he’d found when he’d led the rest of Suwail’s regiment and his own to what he’d hoped desperately might be the rescue.
The men who’d died fighting had been the lucky ones, and the rebels had reserved the most inventive punishment for the officers and noncoms who’d led their subordinates into heresy and blasphemy. He didn’t know whether or not they’d had an inquisitor along for guidance, but they’d certainly done their best to apply the full rigor of the Punishment of Schueler.
He’d caught about half of the rebel militia three five-days later. He hadn’t allowed his men to repay their prisoners in kind, however; he’d been willing to settle for ropes, and they’d hung every single one of the murderous bastards.
It was that sort of war.
* * *
“I see you were right, Master Navyz,” Colonel Byrgair said, gazing south towards the infantry-crowned hilltop.
“Told you I’d get you ’round the motherless, Shan-wei-damned heretics, Colonel.” Hatred thickened Wylfryd Navyz’ Siddarmarkian accent. “Bastards thought they could hang three of my brothers and just walk away home, did they?” He leaned from the saddle and spat noisily. “That for the lot of ’em!”
“Well, I don’t think they’ll be walking away home after all, Master Navyz.” Byrgair tried to hide his distaste. He supposed the man’s corrosive hatred was inevitable, but Navyz—and quite a few others he’d encountered since crossing the Republic’s frontier—radiated a sick, burning rage that seemed to poison the very air around them. “And thanks to you, I think they’re in an even worse predicament than they realize.”
Drums began to rattle, and he looked at his company commanders.
“Gentlemen, you know what to do. Don’t screw it up!”
He glowered ferociously and waited until they’d answered him with salutes and confident grins. Then he reined his horse around and headed north, up the road.
He felt a vague sense of pity for those Siddarmarkian pikemen, although it wasn’t going to deflect him from his own duty. He hadn’t seen a single horse among them, which wasn’t surprising after the last winter. The Republic boasted very little cavalry, but usually even an infantry regiment had an attached section or two of mounted scouts. This infantry didn’t, and because it didn’t, it couldn’t have any idea what was happening beyond eyeshot of the road itself. And unless it was more intimately familiar with the territory than Wylfryd Navyz, it wouldn’t know about the narrow trail which paralleled the high road to the west, beyond the thick growth of pre-consecration trees and vines which shaded the main roadbed. He’d had to take the teams from Captain Syrahlla’s guns to drag Captain Fowail’s artillery through that miserable slot of a so-called road. Syrahlla hadn’t cared for that at all, and he’d tried to argue, but Byrgair had needed those big, strong draft horses. Syrahlla, coming up the high road with Bahcher after the Siddarmarkians had passed, could make do with borrowed cavalry horses on the main roadbed’s much better going. Even with the double teams, getting Fowail’s guns through had been a nightmare, but they’d managed, and in about another thirty or forty minutes, those Siddarmarkians were going to get a most unpleasant surprise.
* * *
Phylyp Mahldyn marched with his drawn sword in his hand, the spine of the blade across his shoulder like an abbreviated pike, as his solid block of infantry moved up the road in the meticulously dressed formation of Siddarmarkian regulars.
He’d taken the lead because his men were more experienced at maintaining the tight formation essential to infantry who planned on taking battle to a mounted adversary. Mahzyngail’s militiamen were damned near as good, and after the last bitter months, he trusted them the way he trusted the steel of his breastplate. But there was no denying the 110th was better suited to take the lead, with Fairstock’s Provisional Company to back them up. Besides, there was no telling when someone was going to turn up behind them, as well.
He’d managed to get a couple of hundred arbalesters deployed to either flank of the pike block, and their bolts seemed sufficient to keep the Dohlarans at bay. Some of his men were looking away briefly from the men in front of them, exchanging brief, stolen sidelong glances with their companions, and he saw smiles on some of those faces as the cavalry continued to back away. It was easy to understand why nervous men in a situation like this one would take what comfort they could from the enemy’s refusal to close with them, but his own heart sank steadily with every stride towards the north.
These people hadn’t ridden like Shan-wei herself just to avoid contact. And they weren’t backing away in anything remotely like panic or fear, either. They were maintaining formation, drifting northward, careful not to stack up and clog the roadway.
They’re not taking any chances on getting stuck long enough for us to try an actual charge, he thought grimly. They’re keeping their distance, and they’re going exactly where they want to go.
He thought again about that valley. This was outside his own area of responsibility and he wasn’t familiar with the maps very far north of Syrk, but he’d passed this way on his original journey from St. Alyk’s to Fort Sheldyn, and if he remembered correctly, some sort of country road or track joined the high road from the west about a mile and a half before they’d reach the valley. It wasn’t much better than a trail—he’d do well to get four men abreast along it—but someone had cleared the trees back where it met the high road. There might just be room in the resulting clearing for the 110th to advance far enough to block the cavalry while Fairstock’s and Mahzyngail’s men moved west along the side road. He might even be able to back his own men—or most of them—into that same narrow slot, where all the cavalry in the world would be useless against a couple of dozen steady men with pikes.
It would be the counsel of desperation, perhaps. He had no idea where that narrow, rutted dirt road might lead, only that it didn’t lead directly into the cavalry in front of him and what might be waiting beyond them. But if they continued forward into the valley’s open terrain, he’d become increasingly vulnerable, especially if it turned out the bastards had brought along a couple of regiments of their dragoons. Eleven or twelve hundred arbalests—or, even worse, horse bows—would be disastrous in that sort of terrain. He hadn’t seen any sign of them yet, but that didn’t mean they didn’t have them.
He listened to the steady, measured rattle of the drums, pacing the pike block’s steady advance, and wondered if there might be a way out of the trap he sensed after all.
* * *
Sir Naythyn Byrgair watched his last company drift back out of the woods into the broader space of the clearing, withdrawing smoothly to either side, and listened to the grim, steady, determined beat of the Siddarmarkian drums.
Not much longer, he thought, glancing to where Captain Fowail had emplaced his six-pounders.
They’d gotten here with time to spare, and they’d used that time properly emplacing the guns. Fowail had dug in the two-gun sections, throwing up the spoil from the gun pits to form low breastworks, so that the pieces’ long, slim muzzles just cleared the dirt when they were run forward into battery. He’d taken time
to seed the ground directly in front of each pit with caltrops, as well. Traditionally regarded as an anti-cavalry weapon, a caltrop’s wickedly sharp, vertical spur could be equally effective against infantry … especially infantry whose effectiveness depended upon the tightness of its formation. And as an added security measure, Byrgair had dismounted one of his companies, spreading its hundred and fifty men in blocks between the three well-separated gun pits. Their lances were considerably shorter than the Siddarmarkians’ eighteen-foot pikes, but they were more than long enough to be dangerous, especially given his troopers’ heavier armor.
The one thing that did worry him were the arbalesters his advanced platoons had reported. On the other hand, they’d have to get into range, and Fowail’s six-pounders had a fire zone four hundred yards deep.
* * *
The afternoon sun was warm on Colonel Mahldyn’s back, and his left hand reached up under the brim of his helmet, swiping sweat from his forehead. The trees were beginning to thin ahead of them. Not much longer before he discovered if the bolt hole he thought he remembered really existed. He hoped it did, because—
* * *
“Fire!”
Six six-pounder guns fired as one. The savage concussion was like a physical fist, punching at every ear, and each gun spewed twenty-seven four-ounce canister balls into the stunned Siddarmarkians’ front rank.
The range was four hundred yards, and at that range, twenty percent of the balls found targets. And not just a single target—the quarter-pound projectiles exploded through human tissue and bone with great, flat, wet slapping sounds, then slammed into the men directly behind their original targets. Mahldyn’s pike block was sixty men across, and the canister tore great, gaping holes all across that frontage. Men screamed—almost as much in shock as in agony—as that totally unexpected blast of fury ripped through them.
They’d never experienced anything like it—never even seen field artillery before. Nothing could have prepared them for that apocalyptic moment, Siddarmarkian regulars or not, and their formation wavered, stumbled to a halt in a welter of blood and bodies, of fallen pikes and screaming, mutilated companions.
Fowail’s crews sprang into action as the guns recoiled, their muzzles streaming smoke. Swabs went down the fuming barrels, canister charges—the projectiles wired to the powder charge so both could be rammed home together—followed, rammers tamped, priming quills stabbed into touchholes, locks were cocked, and then the gunners heaved the pieces back into firing position and they bellowed fresh thunder.
It took twenty seconds to reload and fire again. Twenty seconds in which the men of the 110th Infantry fought to understand what had happened, while sergeants and lieutenants in the forward companies struggled to fill the holes in the forward ranks. It was an impossible task, but Mahldyn’s men were veterans. They’d already made their tour of hell under their officers, and they responded. They closed up their ranks, faces like iron as they marched directly across the bodies of dead and wounded companions, and the pikes steadied as the drums snarled fiercely, ordering the charge.
And as they started forward, those dreadful guns fired again.
* * *
The brisk wind rolled the choking, rotten-smelling clouds of powder smoke to the east, clearing the range, and Byrgair watched the front of the Siddarmarkian pike block disintegrate. It was like watching an ocean wave sweep into a child’s sand castle as the tide came in, but no sand castle ever bled and screamed and died. He’d had his doubts about the effectiveness of six-pounders, especially since no one had figured out how to produce any of the exploding “shells” for guns that small. Indeed, even as he watched the carnage, a small voice in the depths of his brain told him that at greater ranges, against rifle-armed opponents, it might be different. But he wasn’t at long range, and his opponents weren’t armed with rifles.
The second salvo of canister struck the pikemen in terrible sprays of red, and Fowail’s men flung themselves on the recoiling pieces again.
* * *
Phylyp Mahldyn swore savagely as he realized what had happened.
He didn’t know how many guns the Dohlarans had managed to concentrate, and he couldn’t begin to imagine how they’d gotten them here in the first place. He’d never actually seen a fieldpiece, but he’d seen naval guns on clumsy, old-style, wheelless carriages. Because of that, the true implications of Charis’ introduction of mobile artillery to the battlefield had been impossible for him to conceptualize, but he recognized the sounds and sights of disaster when they were all around him.
He grabbed one of his runners, a wide-eyed young corporal, and shook him savagely by the shoulder.
“Get to the rear! Tell Major Fairstock and Colonel Mahzyngail to fall back—they’re to get clear! Understand me? They’re to get clear!”
“Yes, Sir!”
Somehow, the youngster even remembered to salute, then he went tearing towards the rear, right arm raised to show the red brassard that marked him as one of Mahldyn’s couriers rather than a deserter fleeing from danger.
The colonel spared him one glance, hoping the boy would have the good sense to stay with Mahzyngail, if he got that far, rather than heading back into these slaughter-pen woods. In the meantime, he had an appointment of his own.
He jerked his head at his white-faced standard-bearer, and the two of them started fighting their way towards the mangled front of his regiment.
* * *
Byrgair’s mouth tightened as somehow, in that inferno of smoke and blood, the Siddarmarkian drums continued to roll, beating the attack. And despite the carnage and the shock, the men of the 110th Infantry responded. That rent and ruined column ground forward, driving into the teeth of Fowail’s canister, but it had four hundred yards to come. Even at a hundred and twenty paces a minute, the fastest a pike block could move, that would take them over three minutes to cover, and Fowail’s gunners hammered them with fists of fire and blood.
* * *
“Forward, boys!” Mahldyn screamed, even as his heart broke. “Forward! Come on, damn it! Forward the Hundred and Tenth!”
He heard the screams, the curses and prayers, and between them he heard a few deep, hoarse voices responding to him, shouting their defiance and hatred, fighting their way into that hurricane of canister shot and flame with their heads down, like men wading into a heavy wind.
But this was a wind of iron, and the thunder behind it reeked of Shan-wei’s own brimstone, and they stumbled and fell over the heaped and twisted bodies of men they’d known and fought beside, in some cases for years.
“Come on, Hundred and Tenth!” Mahldyn cried, hardly able to see through his tears as he watched and heard his regiment dying around him. “Come on, boys! For me! Follow me!”
And follow they did, to the very ramparts of hell. They were no saints, no heroes out of legend. They were only men, loyal to their oaths, to their Republic, to each other … and to him. Men for whom surrender was not an option, who knew they were going to die and whose only remaining desire was to kill one more enemy before they did.
“Follow me! Follow—”
Phylyp Mahldyn flew backwards as the canister ball struck him squarely in the throat and half decapitated him.
He died almost instantly, but other voices took up the cry. Not in words—there were no words any longer. There was only a primal bellow, a snarling, furious sound of rage, and the men of the 110th Infantry broke ranks at last—not to run away, but to hurl themselves bodily upon their enemies.
* * *
Sir Naythyn Byrgair stiffened incredulously in his saddle as shrieking wildmen erupted out of the smoke and carnage. He’d never heard of a Siddarmarkian pike block breaking formation to charge, but this one had taken too much, been hammered too hard, to do anything else. They threw themselves into the teeth of the six-pounders, fanning out, lunging forward as if eighteen-foot pikes were bayoneted muskets, and yet another withering blast of canister erupted into their faces.
Men were blown back of
f their feet by threes and by half-dozens, yet other men charged right across them, and they were too close now for the guns to reload again.
They were a spent force, with no hope in the world of breaking through their enemies, and they didn’t care. Not one of them threw away his weapon and tried to surrender. Not one turned and ran. And before they died, ninety-three of Byrgair’s cavalrymen and twenty-six of Captain Maikel Fowail’s artillerists died with them.
* * *
Byrgair dismounted slowly, aware there was blood on his saber but not really remembering how it had gotten there. He stood there, his shoulder leaning against his nervous horse, smelling the blood and sewer stench of the battlefield, the reek of powder smoke, listening to the chorus of moans and shrieks.
Langhorne, he thought, wiping his blade. He sheathed it, then wiped his face with a hand he was vaguely surprised wasn’t trembling. Sweet Langhorne. I didn’t really think … didn’t expect.…
The truth, he realized numbly, was that nothing could have prepared him for this. For all his years of service, the quick cut-and-thrust encounters with Sodaran brigands or horse thieves, this was his first true battlefield, and the sheer, concentrated carnage surpassed anything he’d ever dreamed of.
These new weapons are Shan-wei’s own get. Langhorne, what have we loosed on the world?!
Father Zhon Bhlakyt, his regiment’s senior surgeon, headed forward with his assistant surgeons and their lay brother helpers. Half of them moved towards his own wounded, but the other half started into the wilderness of torn and twisted Siddarmarkian bodies.
“Waste of good time,” a voice rasped beside him, and he turned his head, looking at the speaker. “They’re for the Punishment if they live, the bastards.” Wylfryd Navyz’s jaw worked on a thick plug of chewleaf, and there was an ugly glint in his eye. He spat a thick stream of brown juice. “Better’n they deserve, if you ask me!”