by David Weber
Massive, broken timbers collapsed under the impact of hurtling bodies and plunged downward, crushing dozens of men and pinning others, but the Twelfth lunged onward. There was no blazing oil from the murder holes, but Guardsmen fired joharns and pistols through them into the reeking, smoke-filled horror of the tunnel. The second gate still stood precariously, too riddled to last but enough to slow the Twelfth’s headlong pace for just a moment, and another ninety men were piled dead before it when it finally went down.
The Twelfth drove onward, carried by a blood-mad fury beyond sanity and driven by the weight of numbers behind them, and a storm of musket fire met them as they slammed through the third and final gate at last. Arlaks bellowed, blasting them with case shot at less than sixty meters, and men slipped and fell on blood-slick stone as the brigade broke out into the open. Men fired their rifles on the run, still charging forward, and slammed into the waiting pikes like a bleeding, dying hammer.
The impact staggered the Guardsmen. Their longer weapons gave them a tremendous advantage in this headlong clash, but the Malagorans rammed onward, and more and more of them swept out of the tunnel. They overwhelmed the front ranks of pikes, burying them under their own bodies, and the Guard gave back—first one step, then another—before the stunning ferocity of that charge. They weren’t fighting men; they were fighting an elemental force. For every Malagoran they killed, two more surged forward, and every one of those charging maniacs fired at pointblank range before he closed with the bayonet. Behind them, other men with lengths of burning slow match lit fuses, and powder-filled, iron hand grenades arced through the smoky air to burst amid the Guard’s ranks. Here and there, their front broke, and Malagorans funneled forward into the holes, bayonets stabbing, taking men in the flank even as the Guard’s charging reserve cut them down in turn. There was no end to the flood of howling heretics, and Guardsmen began to look over their shoulders for the reinforcements they’d been promised.
More Malagorans charged through the gate tunnel, and still more. The space between the wall and the pikes was a solid mass of men, each fighting to get forward to kill at least one Guardsman before he died. The casualty count was overwhelmingly in the Guard’s favor, but the Malagorans seemed willing to take any losses, and at last, slowly, the pikes began to crumble. Here a man went down screaming; there another began to edge back; to one side, another dropped his pike and turned to run; and the Malagorans drove forward with renewed ferocity as they sensed the shifting tide.
The Guard’s officers did everything mortal men could do, but mortal men couldn’t stop that frenzied charge, and what had begun slowly spread and accelerated. A stubborn withdrawal became first a retreat, then a rout, and the Malagorans swarmed over any man who tried to stand while others fought their way meter by bloody meter up the stairs on the wall’s inner face. The last of the pikemen, abandoned by their fellows, turned to run, and the baying Malagoran army swept into the city.
Two hundred of the Twelfth Brigade were still on their feet to join it.
* * *
“We’re through the gate, Lord Sean!” Tibold shouted into the com. “We’re through the gate!”
“I know, Tibold.” Sean closed his eyes, and tears streaked his face, for he was tied into Brashan’s orbital arrays. The smoke and chaos made it impossible to sort out details from orbit, even for Imperial optics, but he didn’t need details to know thousands of his men lay dead or wounded.
“Watch it, Tibold!” Harriet’s voice cut into the circuit. “The men you routed just ran into their reinforcements. You’ve got ten or twenty thousand fresh troops coming at you, and the survivors from the gates are rallying behind them!”
“Let them come!” the ex-Guardsman exulted. “We hold the gate now. They can’t keep us out, and I’ll take them in a straight fight any day, Lady Harry!”
“Sean, you’ve got more men coming at you, too,” Harriet warned.
“I see ’em, Harry.”
“Hang on, Lord Sean!” Tibold said urgently.
“We will,” Sean promised grimly, and opened his eyes. “Pass the word, Folmak. They’re coming in from the east and west.”
* * *
“What’s happening, Lord Marshal?” Vroxhan demanded edgily as a panting messenger handed Surak a message. The lord marshal scanned it, then crumpled it in his fist.
“The heretics have carried the gates, Holiness.”
“God will strengthen our men,” Vroxhan promised.
“I hope you’re right, Holiness,” Surak said grimly. “High-Captain Therah reports the heretics took at least two thousand casualties, and they’re still driving forward, not even pausing to regroup. It would seem,” he faced the high priest squarely, “their outrage at our treachery is even greater than I’d feared.”
“We acted in the name of God, Lord Marshal!” Vroxhan snapped. “Do not dare presume to question God’s will!”
“I didn’t question His will,” Surak said with dangerous emphasis. “I only observe that men enraged by betrayal can accomplish things other men cannot. Our losses will be heavy, Holiness.”
“Then they’ll be heavy!” Vroxhan glared at him, then slammed his fist on a map of the Temple with a snarl. “What of the heretic leaders?”
“A fresh attack is going in now, Holiness.”
* * *
The ordnance depot’s stone wall was for security, not serious defense. Two wide gateways pierced it to north and south, but Folmak’s men had loopholed the wall, barricaded the gates with paving stones and artillery limbers, and wheeled captured arlaks into place to fire out them. It wasn’t much of a fort, but it was infinitely preferable to trying to stand in the streets or squares of the city.
The surviving Guardsmen of the original ambush surrounded the depot, reinforced by several thousand more men and four batteries of arlaks. Now their guns moved up along side streets that couldn’t be engaged from the gateways. The Guard’s gunners had learned what happened to artillerists who unlimbered in range of rifles, and they dragged their batteries into the warehouses that flanked the depot. Hammers and axes smashed crude gunports in warehouse walls, and arlak muzzles thrust out through them.
Sean saw it coming, but there was nothing he could do to prevent it. Ammunition parties had hauled cases of Guard musket balls out of the depot and issued them to his men, who had orders to use the smoothbore ammunition for close range fighting and conserve their rifle ammunition, and he stood in a window of the depot commander’s office and watched stone dust and wooden splinters fly from the warehouse walls as picked marksmen fired on the small targets the improvised gunports offered. Some of their shots were going home, and no doubt at least a few were actually hitting someone, but not enough to stop the enemy’s preparations.
And then the arlaks began to bark.
Eight-kilo balls fired at less than sixty meters slammed into the depot wall, and it had never been meant to resist artillery. Lumps of rock flew, and he clenched his jaw.
“They’re going to blow breaches, then put in the pikes,” he told Folmak harshly. “Start a couple of companies building barricades behind the wall. Use whatever they can find, and see about parking some more arlaks among them. We’ll let them blow their breach, then open up when they come through.”
“At once, Lord Sean!” Folmak slapped his breastplate and vanished, and Sandy crossed to Sean.
“I wish to hell you hadn’t come,” he rasped. “Goddamn it, what did you think you were doing?”
“Saving your butt, among other things!” she shot back, but her words lacked their usual tartness, and she touched his elbow. “How bad is it, Sean?” she asked in a softer voice. “Can we hold?”
“No,” he said flatly. “They’ll just keep throwing men at us—or stand back and batter us with artillery. Sooner or later, the First is going down.”
“Unless Tibold gets here first,” she said through the thunder of the guns.
“Unless Tibold gets here first,” he agreed grimly.
C
hapter Thirty-Nine
Case shot screamed down the street as the Malagoran chagors recoiled, and High-Captain Therah winced as it scythed through his men. Teams of heretic infantry had hauled the light guns forward, and if their shot was only half as heavy as the Guard’s arlaks threw, the smaller, lighter chagors were also far more maneuverable. Worse, the heretics could fire with impossible speed—faster than a Guard musketeer!—and the deadly guns had cost Therah’s men dearly.
He still didn’t know what had happened, but the heretics’ conviction that any treachery had been the Temple’s lent them a furious, driving power Therah had never faced in seven long Pardalian years as a soldier. Half of them were screaming “Lord Sean and no quarter!” as they charged, and all of them were fighting like the very demons they worshiped. By his most optimistic estimate, the Guard had already lost six or seven thousand men, and there was no end in sight. But the heretics were paying, too, for their fury drove them into headlong, battering attacks.
Which didn’t mean they weren’t winning. His men knew the city better than they, yet somehow they spotted every major flanking move. Smaller parties seemed able to evade their attention and hit their flanks out of alleys and side streets, yet such piecemeal attacks could only slow them, and the hordes of terrified civilians choking the streets shackled his own movements.
But he was learning, too, he thought grimly. His musketeers were no match for heretic riflemen in the open, so every precious musket was dug into the taller buildings along the heretics’ line of advance. Their slower-firing smoothbores were just as deadly at close range, and their firing positions at second- and third-story loopholes shielded them from return fire. Therah was positive the heretics’ losses were far higher than his own, yet still they drove forward, flowing down every side street, spreading out at every intersection. They bored ever deeper into the Temple, like a holocaust, and as the conflict spread, it grew harder and harder to control it or even grasp what was going on.
The chagors fired another salvo, and then the heretic infantry charged with their terrible, baying war cry. Their accursed pipes shrilled like damned souls, and their bayonets cut through the staggered ranks of his surviving pikemen. The heretics howled in triumph—and then their howls were drowned by the roar of arlaks. The pikes had held just long enough for the artillerists behind them to complete their chest-high barricade of paving stones, and the guns spewed flame through gaps in the crude barrier. Grape shot splashed walls and pavement with blood, and not even demon-worshipers could stand that fire. They fell back, running for their own guns, and a bitter duel sprang up between their chagors and the Guard arlaks. Field pieces thundered at one another at a range of no more than eighty paces, straight down the broad avenue of the North Way, and Therah turned away from the window to glare down at his map.
The heretic point was halfway to the Place of Martyrs, but he could hold. He knew he could. Their casualties were even greater than his, and, aside from the North Way itself, he’d stopped their advance along most of the main avenues within three or four thousand paces of North Gate. Now his guns were dug in across the North Way, and if he didn’t expect them to hold for long, successive positions were being built behind them. He could bleed the heretics to death as they battered their way through one strongpoint after another, but only if he had more men!
It was the side streets. His strength was being eaten up in scores of small blocking forces, racing to cut off each new penetration. Every man he committed to holding them there was one less to cover the main thoroughfares, but if he didn’t block the side routes, the heretics filtered forward—taking their accursed chagors with them—and cut in behind his main positions. He needed more men, yet Lord Marshal Surak refused to release them. A full third of the available Guard was still hammering away at the heretics’ leaders or covering routes they might use to join their fellows if they somehow broke out of the artillery depot. The men Therah did have were fighting like heroes, but something was going to break if he couldn’t convince Surak to reinforce him.
“Signalman!” He didn’t even look up as a signals officer materialized beside him. “Signal to Lord Marshal Surak: ‘I must have more men. We hold the main approaches, but the demon-worshipers are breaking through the side streets. Losses are heavy. Unless reinforced, I cannot be responsible for the consequences.’ ” He paused, wondering if he’d been too direct, then shrugged. “Send it.”
He looked back out the window just as a ball from a heretic chagor struck an arlak on the muzzle. The gun tube leapt into the air like a clumsy talmahk, then crashed back down to crush half a dozen men, and he swore. His gunners were killing the heretic artillerists, but despite their barricade, they were being ground away by the demon-worshipers’ greater rate of fire.
“Message to Under-Captain Reskah! He’s to move his battery up to Saint Halmath Street. Have him deploy to take the heretics in flank as they advance on the Street of Lamps position. Then get another messenger to Under-Captain Gartha. He’s to bring his pikes—”
High-Captain Therah went on barking orders even as his staff began to gather up their maps in preparation to fall back yet again.
* * *
Sean crouched behind his own rock pile with Sandy as the latest assault fell back into the smoke. The depot wall had become little more than a tumbled heap of broken stone, but his men were dug in behind it, and dead and dying Guardsmen littered the approaches. The wooden warehouses to the east were a roaring mass of flames, but the ones on the west side were stone, and the Guard arlaks in them were still in action.
Folmak crawled up beside him, keeping low as musket balls whined and skipped from the crude breastwork. The ex-miller’s breastplate was dented, and his left arm hung in a bloody sling, but he carried a smoking pistol in his right hand. He flopped down beside Sean and passed the weapon back to his orderly to reload before he tugged a replacement from his sash.
“We’re down to about nine hundred effectives, My Lord.” The Malagoran coughed on the smoke. “I make it three hundred dead and six hundred wounded, and the surgeons are out of dressings.” He turned his head to watch Sandy rip open an iron-strapped crate of musket ammunition with one bio-enhanced hand and managed a grim smile. “At least we’ve still got plenty of ammunition.”
“Glad something’s going right,” Sean grunted, and rose cautiously to fire at a Guardsman. The man threw up his arms and sprawled forward, and Sean dropped back beside Folmak as answering fire cracked and whined about his ears.
He rolled on his back to reload the pistol, and his thoughts were grim. The Guard was coming at them only from the west now, but it was still coming. As Lee had proven at Cold Harbor and Petersburg, dug in riflemen could hold against many times their own numbers, but each assault crashed a little closer to success, like waves devouring a beach, and his line was a little thinner as each fell back. Another two or three hours, he thought.
He drew the hammer to the half-cocked safety position and primed the pistol while he stared up into the smoke-sick afternoon sky. He could hear the thunder of battle from the north in the rare intervals when the firing here slowed, and he was still tied into Brashan’s arrays. The satellites could see less and less as smoke and the spreading fires blinded their passive sensors, but he was still in touch with Tibold and Harriet, as well. The ex-Guardsman had battered his way halfway to the Place of Martyrs, but at horrible cost. No one could be certain, and he knew people tended to assume the worst while the dying was still happening, but even allowing for that, Harriet estimated Tibold had lost over a sixth of his men. The Angels’ Army was being ground away, and there was nothing he could do about it. Even if the army had tried, it was in too deep to disengage, and he knew Tibold would refuse to so much as make the attempt as long as he, Tamman, or Sandy were still alive.
Which they wouldn’t be for too very much longer, he thought bitterly.
“Sean! Movement to the north!”
He rolled onto his side and rose on an elbow, peering to his right
as Tamman’s warning came over the com, but not even enhanced eyes could see anything from here.
“What kind of movement?” he asked, and there was a moment of silence before Tamman replied slowly.
“Dunno, Sean. Looks like … By God, it is! They’re moving back!”
“Moving back?” Sean looked at Sandy. Her smoke-grimed face was drawn, but she shrugged her own puzzlement. “Are they shifting west, Tam?”
“No way. They’re pulling straight back. Just a sec.” There was another pause as Tamman crawled through the rubble to a better vantage point. “Okay. I can see ’em better now. Sean, the bastards are forming a route column! They’re moving straight towards the Place of Martyrs!”
Sean was about to reply when a junior officer flung himself on his belly behind the rock pile. The young man was breathing hard and filthy from head to toe, but he slapped his breastplate in a sort of abbreviated salute.
“Lord Sean! They’re moving back on the south side.”
“How far back?”
“Their musketeers are still in the buildings, but their pikemen are falling clear back behind them, My Lord.”
Sean stared at him and forced his cringing brain to work. The Guard had to know it was grinding the First away, so why fall back now? It couldn’t be simply to reorganize, not if Tamman was right about the column marching north for the Place of Martyrs. But if not that, then—
“They’re reinforcing against Tibold,” he said softly. Folmak looked at him for a moment, then nodded.
“They must be,” he agreed, and Sean looked at the under-captain.
“How many pikes did they pull off the south side?”
“I’m not certain, My Lord—” the Malagoran began, and Sean shook his head.