by Col Buchanan
It was Creed the fighter, the general, the hard-headed bastard that Coya had always described to her with so much admiration, standing there before them now.
‘I thought I was cursed. Truly. I hadn’t known you people could do such things.’
‘I hardly know what we can do yet either. But you’re safe now. I’ve placed protections around you to keep away anything like this in the future. A few traps too that will burn a mind if they try to break them.’
He grunted, arching his back so that his bones crackled loudly. ‘Ahhh.’
‘You should take it easy for a while,’ suggested Coya. ‘Allow your body to recover.’
But the Lord Protector dropped his arms and flashed that wolfish grin he was so famous for.
‘Gollanse!’ he shouted with a voice of steel through the open doorway to his chambers. ‘Have my armour brought to me, at once, you hear?’
‘Your armour?’ came a creaking voice a few moments later.
‘Yes, old man. Do it quickly now. And make ready to send a message through our farcry.’
Creed’s old attendant poked his greyed head through the doorway and saw him standing there swaying. He cast a quick, fearful look at the Dreamer before vanishing back inside.
‘Give me that,’ said Creed and snatched the rush oil from Coya’s hand to apply some more.
In the gathering gloom, the Lord Protector of Khos observed the range of his battered city and then the walls of the Shield, where the bombardments were raining down in the fall of twilight, and then beyond that scene to the far smudge of light that was Camp Liberty.
Mokabi, said the spite in his eyes.
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
The Raid on Camp Liberty
‘Sir, message received. The Dreamer confirms that he’s ready. We may begin the night assault at once.’
‘Very well,’ snapped General Mokabi from where he stood on the upper deck of his warwagon, his clammy hands resting on the wooden crenellations.
Squeezed into the muscular form of his decorative white armour, Mokabi stared ahead at the distant, foremost embankment of the Shield that was Singer’s Wall, and watched the lights of explosions along its dark slope still at play, his hands clenching and unclenching.
He needed that damned wall to fall tonight. He needed his surge to wash over the battlements like an unstoppable tide, sweeping away the defenders with it, so that he could finish off the remaining two walls with haste. What he needed was an outright massacre.
Behind him to the south, the small squadron of powder ships – or suicide ships, as the squadron itself was calling them – was preparing to launch. They had successfully refined their technique over the previous few weeks, though it remained a hit or miss tactic in the extreme. Either the ships would end up being as vital to Mokabi’s plan as anything else tonight, or they would betray themselves as little more than the world’s most expensive fireworks.
No, they had to work. They had to punch holes right through that wall, and quickly enough that his forces could surge through and surround its defenders. Otherwise the success of the attack would likely hang on Tabor Seech, the very last person Mokabi wished to rely upon – fixated as he was on some personal feud with the enemy Dreamer. For Seech had claimed he could shake a portion of the wall loose. He had sworn to bring a portion of it down.
Mokabi frowned, thinking of what lay ahead.
A surprise night attack, throwing everything he had at the Shield under cover of darkness, supported by siege towers, mammoots, sky-ships, flying mines and a Dreamer shaking the very walls. It should be unstoppable.
Yet it was a risk, committing everything to a single offensive. As remote as the chances were for disaster, Mokabi had never been the coolest of gamblers, not when everything lay on the line. The general’s palms were sweating. His guts churned loudly enough to be heard by his attendants.
It shamed him enough that he spoke aloud, addressing his old officer Fenetti by his side.
‘So it all comes down to this, eh, Fenetti?’
‘Aye, my lord,’ the man replied without commitment.
Mokabi bristled, feeling the isolation of command like never before.
*
Deep beneath the Shield, hundreds of stooped figures shuffled through the tunnel while the dull thud of explosions shook the ground above their heads and rattled the string of lanterns hanging from the beams, filling the tight passage with their acrid smoke. Ash-blackened faces glanced up nervously. Men muttered to those before them to hurry up, to keep the pace going.
For many of the Specials, it seemed as though they had been moving along this tunnel for an endless time, their slow progress marked by the occasional whitewashed number on a beam that told them the distance they had made so far. An eternity ago they had passed beneath Singer’s Wall. Now they were beneath the enemy’s foremost positions, passing below the feet of imperial forces hunkered down in the ruins of the fallen walls while Khosian guns pounded their positions. Onwards still the head of the line pushed, heading deeper behind enemy lines. In the smoky air between their pinched, ash-smeared faces their mood was a palpable one. They were on their own now, with no one to rely upon but themselves.
The hundreds of Specials wore enemy uniforms weighed down with webbings and belts of weaponry. Many carried heavy packs of powder mines on their backs, which they would use to blow up the arsenals of Camp Liberty during their raid.
Amongst the airless press of them, a group of Rōshun splashed through the half foot of water that filled the tunnel, nine figures dressed in black and lightly armed in comparison.
‘Who did they think they were making this tunnel for,’ complained one of the Rōshun, the biggest one. ‘Women and children?’
The figure was Baracha, stooped low at the front of the small group, his scalp scraping against another roof beam, his shoulders brushing along the bare earthen walls.
‘I doubt they had a seven-foot Alhazii in mind,’ said young Bones with the crazy blue eyes.
Another explosion overhead caused the beams to creak loudly and loose earth to trickle down on their heads. Baracha glanced back without expression to take in the line behind. He showed no fear, as usual, only that vague annoyance his expression always seemed to carry whether there was reason for it or not. The Alhazii brushed the back of his sleeve across his sweating forehead, careful of the punch-spike he had fixed to the arm where the hand was missing.
In a long steaming line they passed the last of the lanterns strung along the ceiling and entered a stretch of pitch blackness.
‘We’re close,’ someone hissed after a few moments. ‘I can feel the air on my face.’
Baracha was seeing spots from the last lantern he had just passed, though gradually he discerned a dull light coming from above. It was the glow of the two moons.
A pair of legs were climbing out of sight above him. A Special, lugging a scoped longrifle up a vertical tunnel on a high wobbling ladder, scattering a fleck of mud from her boot. He wiped it off irritably.
When it was his turn, he found that the rungs of the ladder were wet and grimy with mud and his boots wanted to slip clear of them. Baracha gritted his teeth and followed the Special upwards.
At last, a breath of icy air on his face and the night sky partly masked by clouds.
On the surface once again, the Rōshun hunkered down together to take their bearings amongst the hundreds of Specials. Cannon rumbled from the distant Shield, imperial artillery embedded between the ruins of the fallen walls blasting thunder and lightning into the night sky. Behind the ruins, the dark shapes of siege towers pulled by mammoots rose above an army filling the entire breadth of the Lansway, all of them moving slowly forwards. A surprise night attack, though the Khosians were waiting for it.
To the south, the bright lights of Camp Liberty shone beneath a night sky thinly populated with moonstruck clouds. On a wide road riders sped back and forth between the forward positions and the sprawling town, which was not as far from the tunnel
mouth as he had been expecting, and was occupied to the east and west by endless tents and the sparkles of fires.
Already the large raiding force of Specials was sweeping silently towards the town with their equipment jingling, many of them wearing Owls.
The Rōshun fixed their own goggles to their eyes, looking to the north where they knew Mokabi’s warwagon to be sitting behind his massed forces. Baracha flashed a signal with his hand and then they were speeding off into the darkness, the Rōshun jogging in a ragged V-shape, wild geese in the night.
*
A roar rose up from the high battlements of Singer’s Wall at the sight of General Creed stepping up onto the parapet, his personal bodyguards forming a powerful wedge around him.
The defenders pumped their fists in the air, acknowledging the Lord Protector as he towered there above the raised shields of his men, with his long black hair shearing sideways in the gusts, his eyes filled with the spurts of dirt and blossoms of fire rising up over the crenellations behind which the defenders had been huddling.
Creed was panting in his heavy armour after their short ride to the front line and the steep climb of steps to the very top of the wall. Too long spent in his chair and bed while his muscled condition wasted away. The soldiers’ shouts revived him though, lifted the general’s chin from the thick collar of his bearskin coat, tightened his throat with sudden emotions as the word of his arrival passed along the battlements like fire in the wind, until it seemed the whole laq-wide span of the wall was resounding with the roar of throats and banging of shields, and a few yipping hunting horns in celebration.
‘Good to see you, General,’ a Red Guard shouted from where he stood amongst a group of reserves around a burning brazier. Creed nodded to the man and flashed his teeth to the others. ‘Damned cold up here!’ he called out as though it was his first time on the Shield on a winter’s night. ‘I’d almost forgotten!’
Beyond the brazier’s glowing coals he saw a line of sharpshooters positioned at the forward crenellations, men of the famed Grey-jackets, comprised of refugees from lands already fallen. Their attentions were returning to the scopes of their longrifles pointed down at the Lansway, where the isthmus flashed beneath a night sky feathered with clouds.
‘Where’s Halahan lurking?’ he called to the foreign fighters at the crenellations, asking for their commander, and a sergeant signalled along the wall to the nearest turret.
‘Darl,’ Creed said to his fastest, smallest bodyguard. ‘Find Halahan for me. And get a hold of General Tanserine too. Quickly now.’
To the rest of his guards, wanting rid of their protective press around him: ‘Go and warm yourselves, lads, I know where you are if I need you.’ They feigned their reluctance, but the night was a bitterly cold one and the braziers had been banked high.
‘I thought you’d given up on us,’ shouted Halahan himself in his tight-fitting jacket of grey, stepping out from the arched doorway of the turret. Soldiers parted before him as he limped towards Creed, grinning lopsidedly.
The two men embraced as brothers, slapping backs and shaking each other with the boyish grins of friendship. Soldiers watched them from the circles of light around the fires.
‘You picked a good night to join us,’ the old Nathalese veteran said at last.
Creed released him and they grew sombre.
‘They’re still massing, then?’
‘Reckon as soon as this barrage stops, they’ll be upon us.’
Together they stepped to the crenellations, where Greyjackets made room for them, and Creed and Halahan looked out upon the Lansway with the whips of the wind narrowing their eyes, the stone of Singer’s Wall shuddering beneath their feet from every nearby explosion. The isthmus was a black road before running out before them across the pale sea, filled as far as they could see with a rash of torchlights which culminated with the distant shine of Camp Liberty.
Mokabi was out there somewhere, Creed knew, perhaps watching this wall even now.
‘You ever hear of what Mokabi did to Hano, the Nathalese queen?’ asked Halahan over the din of falling mortar rounds, sharing something of the same thought. ‘After Nathal fell to the Empire, he had her impaled on a hundred-foot spike along with as many others as would fit onto it. Then he left them there to die.’
It was the first time in years Creed had heard his friend speaking of his past, this man who had once been a Nathalese preacher before joining the fighting in defence of his homeland; who had cast his religious convictions into the gutter after the ruin and enslavement of his people. But then it was that kind of night, for Creed could feel it himself; a night for reckonings.
‘I’m told the raid on the camp was your idea,’ Creed said.
‘No, I only pushed for it. Though if they manage to hit the powder stores I’ll claim it was all mine.’
‘Let’s hope the Rōshun can get close enough to slice his throat.’
Teeth shone in the moonlight.
‘Listen,’ said Creed suddenly, looking out over the killing ground beyond the wall. The enemy barrage had stopped. Long moments had passed without any incoming fire. Already, the Khosian guns along the parapet were falling silent in response.
An eerie hush fell across the darkness of the killing ground. Creed’s armour creaked as he leaned closer.
All was blackness out there save for the lingering flashes of fire in his vision. By his side Halahan snuggled the butt of a longrifle against his shoulder and peered out through the scope with a pair of Owls.
‘Anything?’
Halahan grunted, quickly swinging the rifle left and right across the width of the isthmus.
‘Someone send up a flare!’ hollered Creed, though other voices were already calling for them too.
Within moments five green flares were arching out over the killing ground, spreading like fingers across the isthmus, hissing and dripping as they rose. In the distance stood the black jagged ruins of Kharnost’s Wall, foremost line of the Mannians’ position. To either side of the field the smaller coastal walls flickered in the ghostly light.
Creed settled his chin on a crenellation, and waited.
As the sputtering flares descended, their circles of light spread across the cratered killing ground, growing brighter.
‘There!’ someone shouted as a sudden mass of running men crossed into the emerald cones of light, with ever more coming behind them in waves.
A roar rose from the enemy throats as the lights of the flares gave them away. The very air shook with the volume of their voices.
‘Gods, will you look at that,’ Halahan exclaimed, squinting though the scope eagerly. ‘A hundred thousand at least. Acolytes and heavy infantry at the front. They’re sending in their finest first.’
A change in tactic then. Mokabi had been playing it cautious and smart up until now, as was his way, nursing his reserves while he used his weakest fighters to grind down the defenders, getting rid of the chaff on both sides. Now he had ditched that entirely, in a change of pace that was uncharacteristic of the old Mannian general. He was sending in his hardest steel first with everything else behind them. All or nothing.
Creed’s chest tightened within his armour.
‘He’s going for the knockout,’ growled his voice. ‘He wants it all tonight, never mind the cost.’
One hundred thousand attackers with the same again in reserves, versus sixteen thousand defending the wall, and another eight thousand more defenders on the next wall behind them, the fall-back position in the event of a calamity.
‘Some siege towers coming in,’ Halahan observed. ‘Lots of ladders and shields too.’
But Creed was paying more attention to their own situation now. He looked down from the great height of Singer’s Wall to the slope of earth fronting much of it, then surveyed its breadth across the Lansway, its parapet thronged with defenders firing and shooting down from their positions.
Cannon opened up along the top of the wall, sending grapeshot down into the enemy rank
s, cutting through their numbers in bloody swathes. Defenders pulled on hand ballistas to toss bundles of grenades into the enemy midst, while larger catapults rained down showers of jagged rocks. It was murderous ground to be crossing. The ragged front of the enemy wave faltered, thinning out as men fell all across the isthmus. But those behind quickly filled their places, screaming their war cries to blast the crippling fear from their hearts – for it was a soldier’s worst nightmare this, even drunk and drugged as many of them would be, ordered to storm a heavily defended position at any cost.
Not that Creed felt pity for a single one of them.
We can hold, the Lord Protector told himself fiercely. These walls have never fallen without first being breached.
Calmer than he had any right to be, General Creed dabbed some rush oil onto his lips from the vial he’d taken from Coya, and felt its quick release of energy surging through him. Just as coolly, Halahan squeezed off a shot then broke open the rifle to reload it.
In ragged waves the enemy reached the earthen slope facing Singer’s Wall and started scrambling up it, many with shields over their heads for protection, heavy infantry and white-clad Acolytes just as Halahan had said. The defenders rained down rocks and arrows and bolts and shots and faming casks of oil, felling them in droves, thinning their ranks enough that all along the line they once more faltered, broke, started taking cover where they could.
On the flat ground before the slope imperial missile troops took up positions behind wicker screens they swiftly erected, returning fire and offering what cover they could to the assault.
More waves rolled in, whittled down by missile fire, joining those hunkering down in cover to fill out their numbers, prompting renewed charges up the slope. Onwards they came like an unstoppable tide.
Around Creed and Halahan, his bodyguards bunched tighter in protection. The Nathalese Greyjacket blasted away as fast as he could shoot and reload.
‘Time for a few words, General?’ shouted a voice nearby.