Gavril nodded, looking on sourly. “I can’t remember the last time I saw you wearing armor. Mine doesn’t fit anymore.”
Tamas jabbed a finger into Gavril’s stomach. “Lose some weight before the next campaign.” Truth be told, Tamas’s barely fit him. He wasn’t about to let Gavril know.
“I’m not coming to the next campaign.”
Pray to Adom that I’m not either, Tamas thought.
The boys finished their job and Tamas climbed onto his horse, then reached down for his ivory-handled pistols, which he thrust in his belt with a thought for Taniel. The boys handed him his sword and carbine. “General Arbor!”
General Arbor reined in beside Tamas, popping out his false teeth and stowing them in a saddlebag before snapping a salute. Arbor had ten years on Tamas and was no powder mage, yet seemed twice as sprightly. Tamas wondered how he did it. “Yes sir! The boys are ready, sir,” he shouted above the cannon fire.
“Good.” He glanced toward Budwiel’s main gate. The door had been smashed nearly to pieces after the latest attack, and the portcullis was a mangled jumble of metal. Ipille’s soldiers weren’t even trying to mend the gate. “Two minutes!”
Gavril climbed into his saddle and glanced down at Andriya. The powder mage held his bayoneted rifle in one hand, the other hand grasping his belt casually. “Is he not riding?”
“Horses don’t like me, and I don’t like them.” Andriya took a pinch of powder from his breast pocket and snorted it.
“You could bathe,” Gavril suggested.
Andriya touched his blood-crusted uniform and laughed.
“He’ll keep up,” Tamas said.
“If you say so. You, boy, give me the flag!”
One of the groomsmen ran forward with the Adran flag, a crimson background with the teardrop of the Adsea sitting before the mountains. He handed it to Gavril.
“Where’s Beon?” Tamas asked. “Andriya, do you know where Beon is?”
Andriya gestured vaguely to the space behind Tamas’s command tent. Standing with a view of the battle, Ipille’s favorite son stood between two guards, his hat shading his eyes, jaw tight as he gazed at Budwiel. Tamas rode over to him.
“Why am I here, Field Marshal?” Beon demanded. “What damned deed do you have planned?”
“What, you think I’m going to threaten you?”
Beon did not respond.
“Tell me truly,” Tamas said, “if I put you in a noose and told your father to throw down his sword or I’d hang you, would he do it?”
“No.”
“I thought not. You’re here because your father’s royal guard will not surrender unless ordered to by a member of the royal family.”
“You think they would listen to me? You think I’d tell them to in the first place?” Beon demanded, chin raised.
“They’ll listen to you if Ipille is dead.”
Beon paled.
“Or,” Tamas continued, “if he’s fled. If I win the day—if I truly take Budwiel and further fighting will do the Kez no good—I want you to tell your men to stand down. Will you do that?”
Beon didn’t answer.
Tamas tugged gently on his reins, edging his mount toward Beon. “This doesn’t have to be any bloodier than it will be. A fight through the city, building to building, is not going to do anyone any good. If I fail, you’ll likely be rescued and you can dance on my corpse.”
“I’d rather not. I have more respect for you than that.”
“I believe you.”
“Very well, Field Marshal. If you clearly win the day, I will order them to stand down—though I can’t guarantee they’ll listen. But how long do you have? How long until the Grand Army comes up behind you? It will take you more than one assault to capture those walls.”
“It better not,” Tamas muttered, nodding to the guard to take Beon away. He held his sword over his head and pointed it at General Arbor. The general dismounted, true to his preference, as a boy took his horse away. Arbor ran ahead of his infantry, shaking his sword and bellowing to his men. They shouted back, bayonets thrusting in the air once, twice, three times.
The snares rolled out a beat and the ground shook beneath the feet of the Adran army.
Seventeen thousand infantry began the march toward Budwiel’s walls. Less than three minutes later they were within range of the few light cannon left to the Kez, and Tamas watched the first rifts open in his columns. Not a man among them wavered, and they continued on, bayonets glimmering in the sunlight.
“That’s a beautiful sight,” Gavril said.
“It is.”
“Sir!” a voice yelled. It was Silvia, the artillery commander. “I need more time. That portcullis will slow you down.”
“You don’t have it,” Tamas said. “Make me an opening! I want a gap in that wall opened when my men are two hundred yards from it.”
Tamas expected her to argue, but she returned to her gun crews, a slew of curses and orders on her lips.
Tamas turned in the saddle. Behind him, three hundred cuirassiers stood ready in their stirrups. Breastplates were polished, helmets donned, and carbines loaded. Each of them was armed with a long lance to reach over the bayonets of the Kez infantry. Their horses wore breastplates and side skirts, the heaviest armor still used by the Adran army.
“Men of the Thirty-Seventh!” he shouted. “That gate is the mouth of the very pit itself. I’m riding through it. Are you with me?”
A roar answered him as their swords were drawn and thumped against their breastplates in a terrible clamor. Tamas grinned at them. “Forward!”
The cuirassiers sheathed their swords and grasped their lances, and at Tamas’s signal they rushed forward. Tamas had left behind fewer than a thousand men in his camp; gun crews, grooms, support. Everything he had he now poured at the walls of Budwiel.
He prayed his men wouldn’t break.
With a sea of lances at his back, Tamas rode through the advancing companies of blue-uniformed Adran infantry. He kept his eyes on the spot on the wall—the one he’d told Silvia about. His heart thumped with the beat of the snare drums as the first cannonball suddenly slammed into one of the off-color stones. He counted the time in his head until the second ball hit, and then his heart lurched with the strike of the third.
Nothing happened. “Bloody pit!” he yelled.
The Kez on the walls lowered their muskets and he could see one of their officers stand up on the fortifications and raise his sword.
On the ground beside Tamas, Andriya kept pace with the horses with little apparent effort, his eyes gleaming from a powder trance. He shouldered his rifle in one smooth motion, not stopping even for a moment, and pulled the trigger. Tamas looked toward the walls, trying to see Andriya’s target—only to bark a laugh as the officer on the parapets plummeted to the ground.
A cloud of smoke rose from the wall a few moments later as the royal guard opened fire. Rows of Adran soldiers went down beneath the volley.
Tamas drew closer and closer. A second series of cannonballs hit the wall in the weak section, and still nothing happened. His men neared the base of the wall, the foremost companies much depleted, and he could see them preparing hooks and ladders for the assault. At the gate, the very last splinters of the blackwood doors had been knocked asunder and the portcullis had been reduced to jagged edges. The entrance yawned like a mouth full of broken, black teeth. Tamas focused his gaze on that. This battle was in motion, and for victory or ruin he could do nothing but ride forward with the tide.
Tamas threw his hands up as a sudden wind tore against him, snatching the breath from his lungs. He sheathed his sword and raised his carbine, looking for a Privileged upon the walls, but was startled to feel something push at him from the Else.
Was this some kind of trick? Another of Ipille’s traps? Tamas opened his third eye and immediately felt the shock travel through his fingertips and into his very core.
The array of colors in the Else that indicated the ancient wards h
olding the wall together writhed. Like a carriage spring pulled into a straight line, they seemed to grow taut, and then with a snap that nearly blew him out of his saddle, the whole thing burst open.
He dropped his third eye, expecting to see the world in ruin, the wall a pile of rubble and his infantry scattered, but no one seemed affected by the blast, and the wall was still whole.
“Did you feel that?” he shouted to Gavril.
“Feel what? You almost fell off your horse.”
Tamas picked out a few infantrymen whom he knew to be Knacked and noted that several had stumbled—one had even fallen. Whatever had just happened, it had affected only those with sorcerous power. He looked to his side to see Andriya still keeping pace on foot, but the powder mage was shaking his head like a confused animal.
Tamas’s attention was brought back to the wall as the next round of straight shot pounded the ancient stone to dust. Green-and-tan-clad bodies tumbled from the heights, and chips of rock took down his soldiers on the front lines. Without the sorcery to protect it, the wall was but porcelain to the modern artillery. Silvia’s cannon all seemed to open on that one spot, and within seconds there was a rubble-strewn path through the wall.
Adran infantry rushed the breach, and that was the last Tamas saw of his front lines as the gatehouse loomed before him.
“Set lances!” he bellowed.
Lances fell into place and a dozen cuirassiers streamed around him to take point. Beside him, Gavril drew his sword, and as one, the whole company thundered through the shattered gate and into the maw of Kez bayonets beyond.
Tamas’s world became chaos. The sound of screaming horses mixed with the frightened yells of men, and the clash of steel on steel filled his ears. The first rank of Kez bayonets was down, but another moved forward to fill its place. The small courtyard beyond the gatehouse became a butcher’s pit of bayonets and lances. He felt a bayonet slash at his breastplate and turned to shoot a Kez soldier in the face with his carbine. In one motion, Tamas holstered the carbine and drew his sword.
A hole appeared in the wall of bayonets. Tamas urged his horse through and then turned against the Kez formation from the side. One Kez soldier turned to face him, and another, and then another, and within moments the Kez ranks were in disarray.
Tamas pressed forward—there were hundreds more cavalry behind him and they wouldn’t do any good in the courtyard. With the bayonet line broken he was able to push through in moments, and soon he was in the street.
The avenue behind the wall was jammed with Kez soldiers. They streamed up to reinforce the walls, shoved forward to fill the gaps, and dozens were already charging toward him. He reached out with his senses and detonated powder among the front rank, blowing them to pieces, letting his sorcery do the work.
There were too many, forced forward by the weight of their own comrades behind them. Even with his sorcery and cavalry, they wouldn’t be able to make a big enough corridor for the infantry to follow.
“Sir,” a cuirassier shouted, “our men are wavering!”
Tamas sheathed his sword. “Damn it! Gavril, give me the flag!”
Gavril paused to unlatch the flag from his saddle, his sword spattered with gore. He threw it overhand and Tamas caught it, leaping from his horse. “Andriya, make me a path!”
Andriya disemboweled a Kez infantryman and sprinted toward the nearest stairs up to the wall. His rifle was spent and probably useless, covered in blood, and he used the bayonet as a spear as he battled his way up the stairs.
Tamas followed in his path, kicking the dead and dying off the stairs in Andriya’s wake. They entered the second floor of the gatehouse and fought their way through the soldiers within. A moment later they were out in the sun.
The scene took Tamas’s breath away. His thousands were churning forward, their bayonets bristling, and the tops of the walls swarmed with the green-on-tan coats of the Kez infantry. His men came over the wall in their hundreds, but he could see the ranks at the base of the wall wavering. His men would break if they weren’t spurred on.
Tamas tore the Kez flag from its holder above the gates and flung it from the heights. It arched downward and toward the embattled armies like a spear. He watched it fall until a Kez grenadier, easily twice his size, charged at him with an indecipherable war cry. Tamas slammed the end of his flagpole into the grenadier’s chin, toppling the Kez, before raising it high above his head and waving it. A shout resounded among the infantry on the ground and he saw them surge forward with renewed vigor.
“Take this!” Tamas said to an Adran infantryman as he climbed over the wall. “Don’t let it drop while you still draw breath.”
“Yes sir!”
Tamas leapt to the grenadier whom he had beaten down and grabbed the man by the hair, dragging him backward into the second floor of the gatehouse.
“Where’s Ipille?” Tamas shouted in Kez.
The grenadier spit in his face and drew his boot knife. Empowered by his powder trance, Tamas lifted him bodily with one hand and snatched his wrist with the other, feeling the bones snap beneath his palm. He slammed the grenadier into the wall hard enough to bring dust down from the rafters.
“Where is your king?”
The grenadier screamed and swung a fist. Tamas caught it, twisting the grenadier and tossing him down the gatehouse stairs. He ducked back out into the sunlight to find the flag still waving and more of his men pouring over the wall.
It wouldn’t be enough.
“Andriya, find out where Ipille is!” Tamas bounded back down the stairs and leapt into his saddle. “Lances!”
Most of the cuirassiers had fought their way past the courtyard and into the street. Tamas counted over a dozen empty saddles, but there were still plenty on their mounts. Tamas fought his way to them, his eye on the current of the fight. He watched the ebb and flow of the Kez infantry, an experienced eye pulling the pattern out of the chaos. He saw them advance, back off, then advance again.
“Formation!”
As the Kez infantry fell back, his cavalry regrouped, pulling tight into formation, lances at the ready. Gavril fell in beside Tamas. “We need to capture Ipille. We won’t be able to take these walls.”
“We will take these walls if I have to do it myself. Lances, wheel left!”
Only about a third of his cavalry still had their lances. They moved to the middle of the formation while the rest took the sides, fighting off the advancing infantry with their heavy sabers.
“Charge!”
The whole group surged forward, slamming into the disorganized crowd of infantry. Even without the lances, there was more to work with in the open avenue. Infantry went down beneath the armored breast of Tamas’s horse and he leaned forward in the saddle, swinging his saber.
A bullet took the cuirassier to Tamas’s right out of his saddle. Another fell with a strangled cry to the enemy bayonets. Their charge ground to a halt after just a hundred paces, but Tamas could see that it was enough.
The breach farther on down the wall seethed with blue uniforms. His own infantry fought their way in, heavy grenadiers at the front. Tamas’s charge had grabbed the Kez’s attention so that his men could take the opening, and like a dam that had formed a crack, the whole tide of the battle broke.
Tamas felt a knock against his breastplate and suddenly his world turned upside down. He threw himself away from his falling horse, rolled beneath the hooves of another, and struggled to his feet, numbness in one leg.
He raised his sword in time to fend off the stroke of a Kez officer. He parried twice and lunged forward for the kill, but his leg gave out beneath him and he tumbled forward, the officer’s sword crashing against his helmet. He raised his sword to fend off another thrust, but a bayonet erupted from the officer’s stomach and the body was thrust aside.
“On your feet, sir!” Andriya snatched Tamas under the arm and helped him up. “There’s more to kill!”
Tamas took the opportunity to check himself. A deep gash ran along
his left thigh—it would be a bad one—and his breastplate bore no fewer than five deep scratches that would otherwise have seen him killed.
“You move too slowly in that thing,” Andriya said.
“That’s just because I’m getting old. The king?”
“He’s holding court in the Kresim Cathedral. As far as these men know, he’s still there.”
Tamas made his way through the fighting, shielded on one side by Andriya and by the avenue shops on the other. He limped to a high stoop and pulled himself up to survey the battle. It could still go either way—more Kez poured in from the side streets and they still held key sections of the wall. They would make Tamas’s men pay in blood for every inch.
Several of Tamas’s cuirassiers, led by Gavril, found him on the stoop. “Can you ride?” Gavril asked. Both he and his mount had taken a score of cuts, and his calf was soaked with blood, but he seemed ready to keep fighting.
“I can.” Tamas extended his hand, and Gavril pulled him up into the saddle behind him. “Kresim Cathedral,” Tamas shouted into Gavril’s ear. “We have to end this now!”
“Up the main thoroughfare?”
“No, take that street there.” Tamas pointed down the avenue to one of the side streets that seemed to have emptied of all its Kez reinforcements. He waved his sword. “Lances! To me!”
They had to fight through two half-built barricades as they made their way toward the center of the city, but it was clear that the barricades were not properly manned, merely someplace for the Kez infantry to fall back to. Tamas’s cavalry numbered less than thirty now, and every man who fell would be one less he could use to storm Ipille’s final stand.
They emerged from one of the side streets into the cathedral plaza. While the Budwiel cathedral was not nearly as large as its recently destroyed cousin in Adopest, it was still a breathtaking building. Four spires rose above the tallest buildings in the city, framing a bronze dome and magnificent, fortresslike walls.
The plaza was empty. Tamas called a halt, sensing a trap.