by David Weber
He’d realized immediately that the larger their group got, the slower it would become … and the more likely it would be to attract the human slash lizards rampaging through the streets. But his grandparents would never have forgiven him for trying to shake off those terrified fugitives, and another part of him had been glad it was so. He knew he would never have forgiven himself later … not that it seemed he was likely to have the opportunity to worry about that after all.
He looked around quickly. There were perhaps a half-dozen other men his age or a few years older in their group. Fathers, most of them, he thought sickly, seeing how their wives and children clung to them. Another three or four were somewhere between them and his grandfather’s age. That was it, and there had to be at least a hundred men in the mob spilling into the avenue behind them.
He stood for just a moment, then turned to his grandfather.
“Give me your sword,” he said.
Claitahn Raimahn’s hand fell to the hilt of the old-fashioned cutlass at his side. The one he’d carried as a young man on long-ago galleon decks—twin to the one hanging from the baldric slung over his grandson’s shoulder.
“Why?” he demanded, and managed a strained smile. “Looks like I’m going to need it in a minute or so!”
“No, you’re not,” Byrk said flatly. “You’re going to take Grandmother—and all the rest of these women and children—to Harbor Hill Court. Number Seven, Harbor Hill Court.” Claitahn’s eyes widened as he recognized Aivah Pahrsahn’s address. “There are … arrangements to protect them there.” Byrk stared into his grandfather’s eyes. “And you’re going to get them there, Grandfather. I’m depending on you for that.”
“Byrk, I can’t—” Claitahn’s voice was stricken, but there was no time for that, and Byrk reached out and drew the older man’s cutlass from its scabbard.
“I love you, Grandfather,” he said softly. “Now go!”
Claitahn stared at him for a moment longer, then dragged in a ragged breath and turned to his weeping wife.
“Come with me,” his voice frayed around the edges. “He’s … he’s right.”
Behind him, Byrk was looking at the other men in their small group.
“Who’s with me?” he demanded. Two of the men about his own age looked away, their expressions shamed. They refused to meet his eyes, and he ignored them, looking at the others.
“I am,” a roughly dressed fellow in his forties said, hefting a truncheon he’d picked up somewhere along the way. He spat on the paving. “Legs’re getting tired, anyway!”
Someone actually managed a laugh, and the others looked at Byrk with frightened, determined faces.
“Here,” he offered his grandfather’s cutlass to a stocky, roughly dressed man carrying a badly cracked baseball bat crusted with blood. There was more dried blood on the fellow’s tunic, although it was obvious none of it was his. Byrk had no idea whether or not the other man had a clue about how to use a sword, but he was obviously determined enough to make a good try.
The man looked at his bat. He hesitated for a moment, then grimaced.
“Thanks.” He dropped the bat and took the cutlass, and Byrk’s eyebrows rose as he took two or three practiced cuts, obviously getting the weapon’s feel. “Militiaman back home,” he explained.
“Good. Glad to meet you, by the way. Byrk Raimahn.” Byrk tapped his chest, and the other man snorted.
“Sailys, Sailys Trahskhat,” he said, then glanced down the street, where the mob had clearly finished coalescing and was beginning to flow towards them. “Pleased to meet you.”
“Likewise.” Byrk drew a deep breath and looked around at his small band. “It’s pretty simple,” he told them. “We slow them down, right?”
“Right,” the fellow with the truncheon said with a grim smile. “And we take as many of the bastards with us as we can!”
The others snarled in agreement and drew into a tighter knot around Byrk in the center of the street.
Byrk’s heart thundered and his hands felt sweaty. Despite all the songs, he’d never really believed battle and killing were glorious, and the truth was that he wanted nothing in this world so much as to run away. Well, either run away or throw up, he thought. But he couldn’t … and, he realized, he wouldn’t have if he could have.
Something else rose up inside him to join the terror and the determination. Something hot and angry and bitter tasting that seemed to quiver in his limbs. There were a lot of things he’d intended to do in his life, and regret flowed through him as he realized he wasn’t going to get them done after all, yet that savage eagerness to get on with it was stronger still.
“Wait for it,” he heard a stranger saying with his own calm voice as the front of the mob accelerated towards them. “Let them come to us. And stay together as long as we can.”
“Die hard,” the truncheon-armed man growled. “Die hard, boys!”
The mob swept towards them, baying its blood hunger, and the tiny knot of Charisians settled even more solidly in place. Byrk watched the Siddarmarkians moving from a walk into a trot, and from a trot into a run, and—
“Fire!” another voice shouted suddenly, and the mob’s howls of fury turned into sudden shrieks of terror as something exploded deafeningly behind Byrk and twenty-five rifled muskets poured fire into them. Men went down, screaming and twisting on the pavement, blood erupting, as the heavy bullets plowed furrows through them.
“Second rank—fire!” the same voice shouted, and more thunder erupted. Byrk spun towards the sound and saw a double line of men in civilian dress—one kneeling; the other standing—all armed with bayoneted rifles. Smoke spewed from the standing line’s weapons, and more of the mob went down. The musketeers were still outnumbered at least three or four to one, but that commanding voice never hesitated.
“At the charge, boys!” it shouted, and the musketeers howled—howled the terrifying war cry of the Charisian Marines—as they lunged forward in a compact, deadly mass behind their bayonets.
The mob was too tightly packed to evade them, and the hungry, hating shouts which had whipped it along only seconds before turned into screams of panic as it disintegrated into individual terrified men desperately trying to get out of the way of those lethal, glittering bayonets.
Bayonets that ran red moments later.
“Well, Byrk?” the voice of command shouted. “Going to just stand there all day?” Byrk looked at the man who’d shouted, and Raif Ahlaixsyn grinned fiercely at him, then pointed at the fleeing mob with his ornately chased, blood-dripping rapier. “Get a move on, man!”
* * *
“Kill the heretics!”
“Death to all traitors!”
“Holy Langhorne and no quarter!”
“Down with tyranny!”
“Kill the bloodsuckers!”
“Kill the Charisian lackeys!”
“God wills it!”
Well, it would’ve been nice if Daryus had made it in time, Greyghor Stohnar thought as the mob began to pour into Constitution Square from the west behind the yammering thunder of its shouted slogans. There were at least five or six thousand of them, he judged with the eye of an ex-military officer who knew what five or six thousand men standing in one place really looked like. There were quite a few men in cassocks and priest’s caps, as well. He couldn’t make out colors very well from this distance, but he was willing to bet most of them were badged with the purple of the Order of Schueler.
He saw pikes and halberds waving here and there, but mostly swords, clubs, some pitchforks … weapons which could be easily concealed or improvised when the moment came. Maybe that was the reason he and Maidyn had underestimated the potential numbers available to Pahtkovair and Airnhart. They’d had their agents focused on looking for stores of heavier, more sophisticated weapons.
Should’ve remembered they can kill you just as dead with a cobblestone as a pike, Greyghor, he told himself. Of course, it is basically a mob, not an army. No telling how good their mor
ale is. They may not have the stomach for it when they come up against formed troops. Then again, he thought as the screaming tide of humanity reoriented itself, coalesced, flowed together, and started across the square, maybe they will.
He glared at that accursed, ornamental gate in the Palace’s outer wall. What he wanted was a massive portcullis, preferably with murder holes and huge cauldrons of boiling oil and naptha waiting for the torch; what he had was nothing at all. It had always been the Republic’s boast that its citizens had access to the center of its government without let or hindrance, which meant there was no gate set into that gleaming, sculpted archway. The damned thing was so wide it took an entire company of pikemen just to cover it, too, and that was an entire company who’d had to be taken off the wall itself.
The mob obviously recognized just how undermanned that wall was, and it seemed to be under at least rudimentary control by its leaders. Its center hung back slightly, threatening the gate arch but keeping its distance while its flanks flowed forward. It was gradual, at first, but the flanking groups moved more and more rapidly, charging for the extreme ends of the wall in an obvious effort to spread the single defending regiment even thinner.
The bastards are coming over it, he told himself, resting one hand on the hilt of the Republic’s Sword of State, hanging from the baldric looped across his right shoulder. That sword had belonged to Lord Protector Ludovyc Urwyn, the Republic’s founder. He’d carried it through a dozen campaigns and at least twenty battles, and despite all the gold and cut gems that had been added to it over the last four centuries, it was still a fighting man’s weapon. If it had been good enough for the Republic’s first Lord Protector, it would be good enough for the Republic’s last Lord Protector when someone pried it from his dead hand.
Best be getting down there, Greyghor. You’ll get a chance to kill more of them at the wall than you will once they’re inside and—
His thoughts broke off as a sudden crashing roll of thunder exploded from the southern edge of the square.
* * *
Borys Sahdlyr whipped around in shocked disbelief as the unmistakable sound of a musket volley crunched down on the mob’s baying shouts like an iron boot. Gunsmoke spurted, rising all along the south side of Constitution Square, and for just an instant, the shattering, totally unexpected concussion of at least a couple of hundred muskets seemed to stun the mob into silence.
Then the screams began again, but they were different this time.
Sahdlyr looked around, unable to see over the men packed between him and that wall of smoke. Then he turned and bulled his way through the shocked, motionless bodies around him until he reached the towering bronze equestrian statue of Ludovyc Urwyn. The complex tracery of its elaborate fountains hadn’t been turned off for the winter yet, and he ignored their icy coldness as he hurdled the wall around the catch basin. He splashed through the knee-deep water, then clambered up onto the base of Urwyn’s statue, getting his head high enough to look across the square.
He was only halfway there when the second volley roared out, and he’d just reached the knees of Urwyn’s horse when a third volley exploded.
Impossible! he thought, listening to that thunder of gunfire. We know exactly how many muskets they had in the city arsenals, and they sent all of them to Fort Raimyr! They can’t have that many of the damned things!
But they did, and his blood ran cold as he finally got high enough to see.
At least a thousand men had poured into Constitution Square from the south while the mob’s attention was concentrated on the Lord Protector’s Palace. There wasn’t a single pike among them, either—every one of them was armed with a musket, and Sahdlyr’s belly twisted with sudden nausea as he realized they weren’t matchlocks. They were the new model flintlocks, and they had the new bayonets, as well, and that was just as impossible as all the rest of it. Mother Church had forbidden the Republic to purchase more than five thousand of the new weapons, and Father Saimyn’s agents knew where all five thousand of those weapons had gone. Over three thousand were at Fort Raimyr, but that wasn’t where these had come from. The men carrying them were no Army musketeers; they wore civilian clothing of every imaginable color and cut, but every single one of them also wore an identifying white sash from right shoulder to left hip.
Sahdlyr clung to his vantage point, and his eyes went cold and bleak as a fourth volley crashed out. There were only three ranks of the newcomers, which meant the first rank had fired and then reloaded in no more than twenty or twenty-five seconds, and that was vastly better than matchlocks could have done. Worse, the successive, deafening, smoky cracks of thunder had carpeted a sixth part of the square with dead, dying, and wounded men.
The newcomers were still outnumbered—badly—but they were a formed, cohesive unit, with all the organization his own mob lacked. Worse, they were far better armed, and their sudden, totally unanticipated appearance had stunned his own men. However willing the “spontaneous” mob might have been when it started out, no amount of willingness could armor it against that kind of surprise.
And once a mob like this breaks, Schueler himself couldn’t get it back together again, Sahdlyr thought numbly. If it breaks once, it’ll turn into a rabble forever, and then—
A fifth volley roared, and then came an even more dreadful sound—the unmistakable high, baying howl of the Imperial Charisian Marines.
No! Sahdlyr shook his head in wild denial. Those can’t be Marines! There’s no way they could have gotten here, even if the Charisians had figured out what was coming, and—!
But it didn’t matter whether or not Charisian Marines could be in the heart of Siddar City. What mattered was that the mob, already worse than simply decimated by those deadly, crashing volleys, recognized the Marines’ war cry when they heard it. And they knew what they and their fellows had already done to the Charisian Quarter … and how Charisian Marines would react to that.
Four hundred and seventeen of the “spontaneous rioters” were trampled to death by their fellows trying to get out of Constitution Square in time.
Little more than half of them made it.
* * *
Greyghor Stohnar passed through the Lord Protector’s Palace’s gate with a guard of thirty pikemen. They had to pick their way carefully over Constitution Square’s corpse-littered, blood-slick paving stones. No one had even begun to count the bodies yet, but there had to be at least a couple of thousand of them.
He approached the command group of the mysterious musketeers who’d appeared in the proverbial nick of time, and his eyebrows rose as a slender figure stepped forward to meet him. Slim hands rose, pushing back the hood of a heavy coat, and he inhaled deeply. They’d never been introduced, but he recognized her without any trouble at all.
“Madam Pahrsahn, I see,” he said as calmly as he could.
“Lord Protector,” she replied with a masculine bow some people might have criticized as scandalously abbreviated and informal, given Stohnar’s exalted position. Considering the circumstances under which he was alive to receive it, however, Stohnar had no bone to pick with it.
“This is a surprise,” he observed, and she laughed as if they were at one of her soirées rather than knee-deep in bodies in the heart of the Republic’s capital.
“I’m sure Lord Henrai’s been keeping you apprised of most of my activities, My Lord,” she replied. “All of the ones he knew about, anyway.” She gave him a dimpled smile. “Obviously, he didn’t know about quite all of them.”
“We were aware you’d acquired a … modestly substantial number of rifled muskets, My Lady,” he responded. “Obviously we didn’t know everything we should have, of course. For example, none of us realized you’d somehow managed to train men to use them without anyone’s noticing.”
“Well, just buying guns and not learning how to use them properly would be pretty silly, don’t you think?” She smiled again. “I’m sure Master Qwentyn told you I’ve been heavily invested in agriculture for years now
, as well. An interesting thing about a big, commercial farm, My Lord—it’s got a lot of empty space. Plenty of room for five or six retired Charisian Marines to train men one company or so at a time without drawing a great deal of attention. Especially if you’ve taken pains over the years to turn any ears that might overhear them into friends of yours by seeing to it that the local freeholders and their families are treated well.”
“I suppose that’s true,” Stohnar said. “And it would appear to be fortunate the Group of Four clearly underestimated you even more badly than we did.”
“They’ve had more experience underestimating me than you might expect, My Lord,” she agreed, and this time her smile was cold and ugly. “This isn’t the first time I’ve crossed swords, so to speak, with the Grand Inquisitor.”
“No?” He considered her for a moment, head cocked, then barked a laugh. “Somehow I find that easy to believe, My Lady! Might I assume that your opportune rescue of myself and my government indicates you intend to continue ‘crossing swords’ with him?”
“Oh, I think you could, My Lord.” She smiled that cold, ugly smile again. “I think you could.”
.V.
Sarm River, Kingdom of Delferahk
“Easy,” Lieutenant Aplyn-Ahrmahk said quietly as the boat moved slowly towards the riverbank in the dim predawn gloom. The water gleamed faintly as the first blush of yellow and rose touched the eastern horizon, and a wyvern whistled querulously from somewhere ahead of them.
“Over the side and find the bottom, Braisyn!” he continued. “Can’t be too deep this close in.”
“Easy for you to say, if you don’t mind me sayin’ so, Sir,” Braisyn, a tall young topman who’d been part of Mahlyk’s boat crew for over two years, replied feelingly.
“Oh, nonsense! Pretend it’s beer—I know that’ll make you feel better about it!”