‘Apparently, the same points were made at the strategy meeting when the Lion put forward his plan,’ whispered Nemiel, leaning forward in a conspiratorial manner, though he had to shout to be heard over the continuing barrage. ‘They say Sar Luther was particularly opposed to it. Jonson asked him to lead the main assault, but initially Luther refused. He said he hadn’t fought side-by-side with him for all these years only to let the Lion go alone into the midst of a dangerous undertaking. He said his place was where it had always been, right by the Lion’s side, until death claimed them both. “If you die, Lion, then I die with you.” That’s what Luther said.’
‘Now I know you’re making it up,’ interrupted Zahariel. ‘How could you know what Sar Luther said? You weren’t there. You’re just spinning a tale and embroidering it too freely. This is all just camp gossip.’
‘Camp gossip, yes,’ agreed Nemiel, ‘but from a reliable source. I heard it from Varael. You know him? He was one of Master Ramiel’s students, but a year older than us. He heard it from Yeltus, who heard it from one of the seneschals, who knows someone who was in the command tent when it happened. They say Jonson and Luther had a furious row, but eventually Luther acceded to the Lion’s wishes.’
‘I almost wish he hadn’t,’ said Zahariel. ‘Don’t get me wrong, Luther is a great man, but when I heard we would be assaulting the fortress, I hoped to fight under the Lion’s banner. He inspires all those around him, and I can’t imagine a greater honour than fighting alongside him. I had hoped it would be today.’
‘There’s always tomorrow, cousin,’ said Nemiel. ‘We’re knights of Caliban now, and the war against the great beasts is not over yet, never mind the war against the Knights of Lupus. There’s every chance you’ll fight at Lord Jonson’s side sooner rather than later.’
In no-man’s-land, the anikols’ crews had abandoned their siege engines. Having placed their charges and set the fuses, they broke from cover and ran towards their own lines.
The enemy on the battlements opened fire when crewmen were in the open, and Zahariel saw at least half of the men fall before they reached the safety of the Order’s trenches. All the while, he crouched in his trench, waiting for the inevitable explosion.
When it came, the blast was spectacular.
The two anikols parked against the fortress walls disappeared in plumes of rising flames as twin explosions rocked the ground underneath him and briefly drowned out the noise of the bombardment. By the time the smoke and dust cleared, Zahariel could see that the anikols had completed their mission.
The outer wall of the enemy fortress was cracked and fire-blackened in two places. In one area it had held firm, but the other the wall had collapsed, creating a breach.
‘Arm up,’ yelled Sar Hadariel to the men in the trench around him. ‘I want safeties off and swords bared. No quarter to the enemy. This is not a tourney or judicial combat. This is war. We take the fortress or we die. They are our only options.’
‘This is it, cousin,’ said Nemiel. ‘Here’s your chance to use that fancy sword of yours.’
Zahariel nodded, ignoring the thinly cloaked barb of jealousy in his cousin’s tone at the mention of his sword. His hand drifted instinctively to the weapon. The hilt and grip were plain and unassuming, bare metal and leather wound with a bronze pommel, but the blade… the blade was something special.
At Lord Jonson’s behest, the Order’s artificers had taken one of the sabre-like fangs of the lion that Zahariel had slain and fashioned it into a sword for him. Its sheen was a pearlescent white, like a tusk, and its edge was lethally sharp, able to part metal or timber at a single stroke. As long as Zahariel’s forearm, it was shorter than a normal sword, but its added potency more than made up for his reduced reach.
The Lion had presented him with the sword before they had set off for the fortress of the Knights of Lupus, and Zahariel had felt the connection of the brotherhood the Order’s Grand Master had spoken of as he had drawn the blade.
Luther and his fellow knights had congratulated him, but Zahariel had seen Nemiel’s jealous eyes linger on the blade as it threw back the sunlight on its smoothed face.
Zahariel heard the sound of a serynx horn, calling across the battlefield in a long, mournful tone, and drew his sword to the admiring glances of his fellow knights.
‘There’s the signal!’ shouted Hadariel. ‘Attack! Attack! Forward! For the Lion! For Luther! For the honour of the Order!’
Already, dozens of figures could be seen emerging from the trenches around them. Zahariel heard Hadariel’s battle cry taken up by hundreds of voices as more knights rose from their trenches and began to charge towards the fortress.
Zahariel recognised the sound of his own voice among the din, even as he leapt from the trench to join the charge.
‘You wanted to make history,’ shouted Nemiel beside him, ‘now’s our chance!’
With that, Nemiel took up the cry as it resounded through no-man’s-land.
‘For the Lion! For Luther! For the Order!’
Together, they charged into the breach.
AFTERWARDS, IN THE annals of the Order, the chroniclers would record it as a decisive moment in the history of Caliban. The defeat of the Knights of Lupus would be characterised as a victory made in the name of human progress.
Lion El’Jonson’s leadership would be praised, as would Luther’s bravery in leading the main assault. The chroniclers would write fulsomely of the white surplices of the Order’s knights, of how they gleamed in the moonlight as their owners charged in daredevil fashion towards the enemy defences.
The reality was, of course, somewhat different.
IT WAS HIS first taste of war, of mass conflict, of the life-or-death struggle between two opposing armies, and Zahariel was afraid. It was not so much that he feared death. Life on Caliban was hard. It bred fatalism into its sons. From childhood he had been taught that his life was a finite resource that could be snatched from him at any moment. By the age of eight, he had faced death directly at least a dozen times. In the Order, once he had completed his first year’s training as a supplicant, he had been expected to practise with real blades and live ammunition.
As part of that same training he had stalked many of the predators that lurked in the forests, including cave-bears, swordtooths, deathwings and raptors. Finally, to prove himself worthy, he had undergone the ultimate test of his prowess, hunting one of the feared Calibanite lions.
He had confronted the creature and he had slain it, earning his knighthood.
War, though, was different from all these triumphs.
When a man hunted an animal, whatever its status, the hunt took the form of an extended duel, a contest of strength, skill and cunning between man and beast. In the course of a hunt, Zahariel would grow to know his adversary intimately. In contrast, war was an impersonal affair.
As he charged towards the enemy fortress beside his fellow knights, Zahariel realised that he could be struck dead on the battlefield without ever knowing the identity of his killer.
He might die and never see his enemy’s face.
It was strange, he supposed, but somehow it did make a difference.
He had always assumed that he would die facing his killer, whether it was a great beast, some lesser animal, or even another knight. The prospect of a death in the midst of battle, brought down at range by some anonymous foe, seemed almost terrifying.
Unnerved, Zahariel briefly felt icy fingers clutching at his heart.
He did not allow it to get the better of him. He was a son of Caliban. He was a knight of the Order. He was a man, and men feel fear, but he refused to surrender to it. His training as a knight included mental exercises intended to help steel his mind in times of crisis. He turned to them now.
He reminded himself of the sayings of the Verbatim, the tome from which flowed all the Order’s teachings. He reminded himself of Master Ramiel. He thought of the old man’s unblinking gaze, the eyes that seemed to drill into his soul. He tho
ught of how disappointed the old man would be if he heard that Zahariel had failed in his duty.
Sometimes, it occurred to Zahariel, it is the height of bravery in a man’s life, simply to be able to put one foot in front of the other and continue in one direction even when every fibre of his being is saying he should turn and the run the other way.
Even as Zahariel ran towards the breach in the fortress wall, he saw bright descending flares as flaming projectiles roared to earth to land among the mass of charging knights. He heard screams, the shrill cries of wounded and dying men rising above the tumult. He saw knights caught in the blast of incendiaries, their bodies wreathed in flame and arms flailing uselessly around them as they stumbled past his field of vision to their deaths.
According to the artificers, each suit was once capable of being sealed against its environment, but such days were now gone. A close enough strike from an incendiary and a knight was all but guaranteed a horrific death as the heat from the fire leaked through his armour.
Scores of knights were dying.
Dozens more screamed in pain as they were wounded. The assault was faltering.
ELEVEN
THE RUBBLE- AND body-strewn slopes of the breach were thick with fire and fury. The curtain of smoke twitched with the passage of bullets, and Zahariel heard the awful sound of their impacts on the knights’ steel plates. The air was filled with buzzing and whining as projectiles whizzed past him.
Zahariel’s tutors had schooled him on the different sounds bullets made as they passed and how to tell how close they were, but in the roaring hell of fire, smoke and noise in the breach, he couldn’t recall any of those lessons.
He scrambled over heaps of twisted rubble, broken slabs of masonry brought down by the explosions that had blasted the walls and piles of loose spoil that had been used as infill. Here and there, he saw the mangled body of one of his enemies, knights in shattered armour who lay broken and dead.
A shot ricocheted from his shoulder guard, sending him lurching off balance, but he quickly recovered from the impact and pushed on. Nemiel was beside him, scrambling up the slope of the breach with frantic energy, desperate to be the first to the top. Geysers of dirt were punched upwards by bullets, and coiling spirals flitted through the air as hails of missiles sawed from above.
Zahariel could see nothing of their enemies beyond smudged silhouettes and flaring muzzle flashes. Scores of knights were dead, but many more were still alive, wading through the weight of fire, and climbing the steep slope of rock and debris to get to grips with the Knights of Lupus.
The fear of death in this hellish ruin was great, but so too was the fear that his first battle as a Knight of the Order might also be his last. He had endured so much and fought so hard to reach this point that he did not want this inglorious, smoke-filled valley of rubble to be the site of his first and final charge.
Zahariel pushed on, the climb awkward due to his sword, but he was loath to climb to the top of the slope and meet an enemy without a blade in his hand. The ground shifted under his feet and he scrambled for purchase as he heard a hard thunk above him, as of timber on stone.
He looked up, seeing the shadow of something bouncing down through the smoke. Its sound was heavy and wooden, and he instantly knew what it was.
‘Get down!’ he yelled. ‘Everyone get down! A mine!’
‘No!’ cried another voice, a more persuasive one. ‘Keep going!’
Zahariel turned to see Sar Luther standing in the centre of the breach, bullets and flames whipping around him as though afraid to touch him. Sar Luther’s arm was extended, and Zahariel saw that he held his pistol aimed up into the smoke.
Luther’s pistol barked and the barrel of explosives vanished in a blinding white sheet of fire and noise high above them. The noise was incredible, and a cascade of shattered rocks tumbled down upon the knights of the Order.
Sar Luther looked down on Zahariel. ‘Up! Everyone get moving up! Now!’
Zahariel leapt to his feet as though the words were hardwired to his nervous system, and began climbing into the fire as though a pack of Calibanite lions were hot on his heels. The rest of his sword line and a dozen others followed suit, the power of Luther’s words driving them onwards.
He saw Nemiel up ahead, and pushed himself harder, not caring about the danger or the fear. The storm of shells from above intensified and he felt a number of stinging impacts on his armour, but none serious enough to stop him. Zahariel glanced behind him to see how many of the knights still climbed.
The red edges of the banner of the Order were frayed and scorched, its fabric ripped with tattered bullet holes, but the banner still flew, and the warriors around it climbed on in the face of almost certain death and pain thanks to its presence.
Zahariel took pride in watching the banner fly above the noble knights of the Order, and returned his attention to the climb ahead of him.
He pushed on, following Sar Luther as he forged upwards, passing every other warrior in the breach with unimaginable courage and speed. Luther’s steps seemed to flow over the rubble, his every footfall helped, his every step as sure as though he walked on a parade ground and not some terrifyingly dangerous breach.
The knights around Luther followed his shining example and followed him. Zahariel went after him into the smoke and felt the slope beneath his feet growing less steep as he climbed. Shapes resolved from the smoke, and he heard a blood-curdling war cry as the Knights of Lupus charged with their distinctive battle howl upon their lips.
Fearsome warriors clad in wolf pelts and bedecked with fangs, the Knights of Lupus may not have been numerous, but each one of them was a great warrior, a fighter trained in the ways of combat and the pursuit of knowledge.
Zahariel ducked a swinging axe blade and thrust with his sword, the blade punching through his attacker’s armour as if through wetted parchment. The man screamed foully and crumpled, blood jetting from his midriff. He wrenched the sword clear and drew the pistol he had been given by Brother Amadis.
All around him was chaos, knights of the Order and the Knights of Lupus caught up in a swirling melee of hacking, roaring chainblades and booming pistols. Zahariel shot and cut and hacked his way through the midst of the hardest fighting, pushing through the screaming throng to reach Sar Luther.
Nemiel bludgeoned his way through the fighting, using brute force and adrenaline to defeat his foes rather than finesse. Even as the knights of the Order began to overwhelm the defenders of the breach, Zahariel wondered how the other assaults were faring.
Had the Lion already carried the north wall?
Could the siege towers already have overwhelmed the defenders of the east wall, or might the troops with grappling hooks and ladders be over the west wall even now? With the Lion’s meticulous planning, anything was possible.
The battle might already be won. A sword crashed against his breastplate, the roaring teeth biting deep into the metal, before sliding clear and ripping upwards into the front of his helm. Zahariel jerked backwards, the teeth of the sword ripping out of the front of his helmet without taking his face with them.
Horrified at his lack of focus, Zahariel swung his sword desperately before him, buying precious seconds to pull his helm from his head and regain his bearings. A knight in grey plate armour, whose face was obscured by a silver helmet worked in the shape of a snarling wolf, danced back from his blows.
Zahariel shook his head clear of the shock of the blow as his opponent came at him again. The chain blade swung in a looping arc for his neck, but he stepped to meet the blow with his sword raised in a classic block. Even as he performed the move, he knew it was a mistake, his opponent luring him into the easy block just to wrong foot him. The enemy knight’s blade seemed to twist in mid-air, the blade arcing for his unprotected neck. Zahariel threw himself back, the blade passing within a finger breadth of opening his throat.
He crashed onto his rump as the knight stepped in for the kill. Zahariel rolled away from the killing
blow, swinging his blade out in a low arc. The edge of his blade sliced clean through the knight’s legs at mid-shin level, and the man toppled like a felled tree.
Zahariel rose to his feet as the knight screamed in agony, the stumps of his legs pumping blood into the dust. Zahariel put a pair of bullets through the man’s helmet to spare him further agonies and took a second to reorient himself with the battle.
Knights streamed over the breach and pushed out onto the walls, slaughtering all in their path. While protected behind their ramparts, the fact that the Knights of Lupus were few had mattered little, but with the Order within the walls of the fortress, numbers meant everything.
Everything Zahariel had read of sieges had told him that they were almost always long, drawn out affairs, battles that moved at a slow pace until a tipping point was reached and the battle ended in one brief and bloody frenzy.
This, Zahariel recognised, was the tipping point of this battle. No matter the success or failure of the diversionary attacks, the Order’s forces had broken open the fortress and nothing could stop them from achieving victory.
The Knights of Lupus, however, had clearly not read the same military manuals and were determined to fight to the last and prolong their death agonies.
‘Zahariel!’ shouted a voice from below, and he looked through the smoke to see Sar Luther within the fortress’s courtyard, beckoning him onwards. ‘If you’re quite finished.’
Zahariel set off once more, crossing the threshold of the breach and making his way down the inner face of the breach in short jumps down the screed of rubble. Knights were massing, and with the wall head clear, it was time to sweep through the fortress and eliminate the last of the defenders.
‘Form into sword lines, we’re going to move through the inner gates towards the keep,’ ordered Luther. ‘It’s sure to get messy, so stay alert! This is the end for the Knights of Lupus, so they’re going to fight like cornered raptors. Keep watching the flanks for an ambush and keep pushing forward! Now let’s go!’
Descent of Angels Page 16