Art of War

by Triantafyllou, Petros

  Clestes held out his match, and Ippeas lit it, murmuring the benediction of fire as he passed the sacred ember, as if they were thurifers in chapel. Clestes took the fire and passed it to the brother next to him.

  Ippeas unhooked the clasp of his khatan so that it would fall away when he rose to his feet. Then he pulled his pouch and pistols to the best position for climbing the rubble pile of the breach.

  When he looked back, he saw Clestes doing the same, and beyond him, an empty field of desert grass with dozens of tiny spirals of smoke rising in the still air. The image of the smoke spirals froze in his brain, and he felt as if he was in deep meditation. Thirty-eight burning matches, their locations marked by the tiny spirals of smoke.

  The mortars fired again, and then the culverin, a shriller bark now that the big gun was hot. Men were screaming in the bastion as the mortar fire grew more accurate, and a woman was screaming out in the trenches where the culverin had found at target. Darkness was minutes away.

  ‘I hear the Sister calling me,’ Ippeas said. Aloud. The words were ritual. Hiding was all very well, but the bastion was already dead. Even if the garrison awoke to their presence this instant, his brothers would carry it. They were already close enough to the breach, too close to be stopped. He was calm. He might die, but his job was done, his gamble won, and nothing remained but the will of Sophia. He stood.

  Thirty-eight voices spoke together, neither hushed nor loud. ‘I hear the Sister calling me.’

  His hand seemed to raise of its own accord. Then they were running through the smoke.

  Ippeas was the first to the angle of the defensive ditch. He slid down the angle into the ditch on his arse, collecting gravel and sand under his backplate and a host of minor abrasions that he ignored. He ran along the base of the wall, headed for the rubble ramp of the breach, looked back to find the ditch already full of his steel-clad brothers. They were readying their grenadoes. Clestes threw his high, and it went well over the wall and burst. Other brothers, the strongest, supported him.

  Ippeas led the smallest men along to the base of the rubble pile and up the ruin of the basalt wall. There would almost certainly be a gun trained on the lip of the breach. Ippeas didn’t plan to go straight into it. Halfway up the breach, hidden from the defenders by the outward turn of the wall, he led his handful across the rubble pile to the right, around the point of the bastion. A few hands over his head, the culverin bellowed defiance, sending its heavy stone ball into the attackers out beyond the approach trench. Four mortars fired together in return, their balls passing high overhead to land in the bastion almost together, followed by a volley of explosions and then more grenadoes from Clestes. Still, Ippeas climbed. He was directly under the embrasure of the culverin. He looked at his party below him on the face of the bastion, motioned to his junior justicar, and Dodes pulled himself up to the other side of the embrasure.

  In the bastion, they could hear the grunts of the gun crew hurrying to load, the calm tones of a sergeant or officer speaking to them in Safi.

  Ippeas made a motion and drew a grenadoe form his pouch. Dodes did the same. He pressed the fuse against the burning match in his match case. Ippeas matched him, gesture for gesture, so that their timing was exact. Fuses were only reliable with the will of Sophia, but men had to make the effort to gain the blessing. An apt sermon.

  Ippeas risked a glance from his lit fuse to the silver forms of his brothers climbing the breech. In the dusk, they looked inhuman, and hard to see; mirrors of the sky above them. But quick. Each of his Justicars had done their duty.

  Grenadoe burning away, the two of them crouched, counted with fists, and threw. Both grenadoes sailed through the embrasure to land inside the bastion. The first explosion threw sand over them where they had flattened themselves against the wall’s timber reinforcement. The second was larger. A plume of sand and smoke rose on a fist of fire and drowned them in fury.

  As soon as the first wash of fire was gone, Ippeas forced himself to his feet and drew his pistols. ‘Magdelene!’ he shouted. He was in the embrasure, he was jumping down into the bastion, he was down on his face, pain like the spread of lightning in a night sky from his right leg, and then he was up again. His pistols were empty—he had fired them—when? And he drew the greatsword. His brothers were flooding the breech, and his own party had swept the crew of the culverin away and butchered the crew of the light gun covering the lip of the breach all in the moments he had been down. He found the bearer of the company standard and roared for his knights to rally, rally at the standard.

  The garrison attempted a counter-attack.

  It was classic defense, the right response, but too slow and without much heart. The plate armour of the brothers brought its own terror. Their repute brought more. The counter-attack fell on the center of an ordered line.

  Ippeas killed a man with the point of his sword, parried a bayonet thrust at his left-hand brother, took his great sword in both hands, and used his sword’s sharp edges to slice away his opponent’s fingers where they grasped his firelock. The soldier dropped the weapon, already screaming. Ippeas beheaded him on the backstroke, his head already turned, looking at his line.

  The counter-attack broke, survivors fleeing into the city-ward edge of the bastion towards a low door.

  Ippeas had no need to order a pursuit. Despite their armor, the sand, and months of deprivation, or perhaps because of them, the brothers were men conditioned to physical excess. They ran the garrison down, pinned them in the corner of their bastion, and butchered them. The survivors of the garrison ran through the low door at the back of the ruined bastion. A few were caught at the door, but the rest burst through, into the open ground between the bastion and the city. In the gloom, Ippeas could see a sally port set in the city wall. Open.

  His heart almost stopped.

  ‘On me!’ he called. ‘Follow me!’

  As they emerged into the brick-lined ditch, the garrison on the city walls began to fire into their own, but the fire was sporadic, indecisive. Crossbow bolts rattled around them, and a harquebus ball shattered stone. Scattering fire.

  ‘At them!’ Ippeas called.

  With a clang, one ball punched Clestes from his feet.

  Ippeas wanted to scream. He felt as if he had been hit himself.

  But he ran on. His company followed. They ran on to where the survivors of the garrison of the bastion pressed to enter the sally port door set low in the city wall. There was no covering fire from the walls. The embrasures next to the sally port were empty.

  Now that he had made it this far, it seemed insane that he and thirty brothers would enter. The enemy would cut them off and seize the gate behind them, kill or capture them all as trophies, and recapture the bastion.

  Ippeas thought of the trail of dead brothers that had brought them to this point, twelve days from the rains. Of the kuria crustals, poisoned to kill the poor.

  Then there was no thought, no prayer, no meditation. He was in the knot of desperate men at the sally port. He thrust, he cut, he thrust again, pushing forward every attack. His sword was gone, in a dying man, and he had a dagger in his fist and a clubbed pistol, and then just his metal-clad fists and the dagger. Then he was through the door and up the narrow stairs on a carpet of bodies, and blow after blow landed on his armour and was turned. A pistol shot caught the comb of his helmet, and the force of it dislocated his jaw, but he pushed up another step and his latest victims fell forward onto him; he lost his balance. He fell back a step, caught himself, lost his dagger in another victim but held the body before him like a pavise. With his free hand, he fumbled a grenadoe from his pouch and kindled it with his will. He tossed it underhand.

  He felt the blow of a weapon into the body he was wielding, and then the force of the grenadoe’s explosion threw him back two steps into his brothers behind him.

  They climbed over him, their boots pressing against his breastplate as they climbed. Then gauntleted hands were helping him to rise.

  I
ppeas followed his brothers past the top of the stair.

  Dodes was first onto the landing. ‘You, you, and you, up and onto the wall. Hold the wall over the gate.’

  Ippeas swatted his shoulder armour, and Dodes turned, his helmeted head inhuman in the fading red light. But the justicar recognized him. ‘Sword.’

  ‘Hold the gate,’ Ippeas ordered. ‘Send whomever is last in line down there back, back to the mortar line. Tell them we can take the city right now.’

  Dodes saluted.

  ‘The rest of you, on me. Pistols loaded. Justicars, count heads and tell me who’s gone. Share out your grenadoes. Everyone needs at least one.’ Above them, where Dodes had led the first three brothers, there was a scream and the sound of fighting.

  Chaerax—not a justicar, but a very steady brother—appeared from the stone steps. ‘Clestes was hit. He’s down but watching the gate. My mess has all its grenadoes.’

  ‘You’re with me, then. Everyone loaded? Brothers, I hear the Sister calling.’

  Then they pushed through the door, off the wall, and into the town.

  There were soldiers in the street, with firelocks. They were ready for the attack, and yet not ready, green soldiers with no experience of close fighting. Ippeas was the first through the door in the wall, and a harquebus ball rang on his gorget, pushed through it, and was stopped by his breastplate. He himself was punched to the ground as if by the hand of a giant, but his brothers ran over him—again.

  He tried to breathe, failed, tried harder. Managed to lift a readied pistol and fire it at the shape of a firelock man across the street. Drew part of a breath. His chest was on fire. Broken ribs, and his breastplate dented so that the ribs couldn’t move back into position.

  Farther away, up the cobbled street that led to the citadel, the sounds of panic began. Screams.

  The pain was rising. Ippeas fought it with all the tools he had—meditation, endurance, prayer. None was sufficient. He clawed at his gorget, couldn’t make his hands work to open the buckles. Couldn’t even shake the gauntlets from his wrists.

  His brothers were all past him now, flooding out into the street. The firelock men were dead or broken. Mostly dead.

  He lay in torment.

  Then fingers popped his burgonet clear of the gorget and opened the gorget. He felt the pressure ease on his breastplate as his eyes grew dim. Then his vision tunneled. It all looked a long way away.

  He felt the breastplate go, the soft release as the ribs were allowed to float back, the flood of pain, and then the ease. He could breathe. His peripheral vision began to return, and then his hearing.

  The first thing he saw clearly was the engineer, Kallinikas, stepping through the door above him. Behind him was a Souliote officer, another woman.

  ‘You got my message,’ he managed.

  ‘I didn’t need an engraved invitation to your party,’ Kallinikas said with a bow. She had a savage smile, and her arming sword was red. ‘You going to live?’

  Brother Lineas, one of the hospital brothers who served in the ranks, stood over him. ‘He’s been hit twice. I am ordering him from this combat.’

  Kallinikas rubbed her chin, watching the Souliotes spill out the door and begin forming by tent groups and then by companies.

  Kallinikas knelt down. ‘I think we can do it. Will your brothers obey me?’

  Ippeas pulled himself to his feat, despite a frown from the hospital brother. ‘They will’ he croaked. ‘Lineas, get Dodes off the wall. Myr Kallinikas, please send two tents and an officer to relieve them.’

  Justicar Dodes appeared. He was covered in blood. He looked as if he had bathed in it. ‘Great Sword?’

  ‘The hospital brother orders me from the field. I cede command to you and ask that you obey the engineer. Kallinikas.’ Ippeas was losing any ability to function.

  Dodes touched his visor in obedience. He immediately faced Kallinikos. ‘Your orders?’

  Now a flood of soldiers were coming up the corpse-choked steps as fast as they could; Byzas militia, and then lobsters on foot, men and women in black armour with heavy swords. They formed across the street and vanished into the town.

  Something was on fire.

  Ippeas couldn’t go down the steps. The tide of soldiers was rising, like sand in an hour glass, and then he began to fall. He caught the stone of the wall, and there was a hand under his armpit.

  It was the Vicar.

  A voice said, ‘My lord, we have taken the sea gate,’ and then he was being carried. Carried out along the glacis, out past the bastion, and a long column of soldiers was waiting; a troop of City cavalry sat on horses, watching.

  The city was falling. He could hear the screams, and he tried to pray for them, even those who served the Pure.

  Because a city taken by storm was hell on earth. And hell had come to Antaikeos.

  Shortblade

  Brandon Draga

  O’den stood opposite his opponent. The visor on his helmet was down, obscuring his periphery, but in that moment, his task was singular. His right hand gripped his trusted sword the way his father had always taught him. He took the plough stance, placing his right foot forward, holding the buckler up in his left hand to sit proudly next to his weapon.

  Without allowing his opponent even a breath, O’den pushed off his right foot and sprung forward, pulling his sword arm back and dropping it. He could see his opponent drop their buckler and await the thrust. With a wide grin hidden beneath his helmet, O’den quickly feinted, swinging his sword arm up and stabbing downward, right where a chink in the armor would leave the spot between the neck and collarbone exposed.

  The strike connected with ease, causing the ramshackle stack of buckets to collapse from the relatively humanoid-looking facsimile in which they had been placed. O’den immediately stepped away from his fallen foe and resumed the plough stance, at the ready should the stack reassemble.

  Behind him, he could hear snickering. The other junior guards were spying on him again.

  “Saving the town again, Overhill?” Bannick’s voice was shrill, nasally, and insufferable, like what might have happened if an arcanist were able to cast a spell on a stoat that gave it a voice. O’den turned to face his tormentor and the other two cronies. To his credit, Bannick’s voice lent itself well to his face, beady eyes and weaselish sneer mocking O’den from behind a slender, upturned nose. To either side of Bannick were Kennor and Ramin. If Bannick was a stoat, Kennor was a burly badger, and Ramin a fish of some kind. O’den didn’t know fish as well as he knew beasts, but he was certain there was one as ugly as Ramin.

  “You three are supposed to be off this shift today.” O’den removed his helmet and stared at each of them, trying to speak with an authority he knew he didn’t have over them.

  “And you’re supposed to be cleaning this stable, not playing make-believe,” Kennor retorted.

  “I finished cleaning an hour ago!” O’den shot back. “And I’m not playing, I’m training.” He didn’t know why he bothered saying anything. They were doing it on purpose, and it wasn’t the first time.

  Bannick laughed. “Training. Of course, how stupid of me! I forgot we were in the presence of Sir Shortblade, the great halfling knight!” Each of the bullies dipped an exaggerated bow.

  O’den felt his grip change on his guards’ baton, clenching it as though it would fly from his hand otherwise. He struggled to not crack all three of them across the backs of their heads, knowing full well that the reprimand for undue use of force was not worth the fleeting satisfaction it would bring. “Look, would you three just crawl back under your rocks until you need to frighten children in the streets again?”

  “Or what?” Ramin’s flat, rotund face looked up with the smug satisfaction of someone too stupid to realize they’d just been insulted. “Are you gonna go tell your daddy on us?”

  “I won’t need to.” O’den scowled. “You’re all likely to get caught by the captain being useless on his time, and then you’ll deal with him anyway.�
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  “Aww, look at you, calling your daddy ‘the captain’, all professional-like.” Bannick brought a hand up to pinch O’den’s cheek, which he deftly swatted away.

  “Well, he is.” O’den felt his blood begin to boil.

  “Yeah?” Kennor chimed in. “You would say that, seeing as he got you this job.”

  “Oh, and your dad didn’t do the same for you?” O’den was indignant. “At least I respect the position! I don’t just treat it as some punishment because I couldn’t hack it as an army brat!”

  “Why you half-sized little shit!” Bannick and Ramin both held the stocky young man back. “At least I get to try! At least my dad is tall enough that he won’t be old and grey, breaking up drunks and shooing vagrants the rest of his life!”

  O’den saw red and started toward Kennor. True, halflings were forbade from army service due to their size, but that never stopped O’den’s father from reading, something most army men lacked. He studied combat voraciously and encouraged his sons to do the same. O’den readjusted the grip on his baton once more, preparing to show Kennor some of what he had learned.

  “Stand down, guards!” a voice boomed from the entrance of the stable that froze all four of the boys in their tracks. “That will be quite enough from the lot of you!” Footsteps clacked on the clay floor, approaching all of them. “In formation, eyes on me.” it commanded, and as quickly as the three bullies were able to untangle themselves and make an about-face, O’den was beside them, straight-backed, eyes forward as Guard Captain Odo Overhill stood before them. For being taller than only O’den, the captain of East Fellowdale’s City Guard cut every bit as imposing a frame as anyone in the Ghestal army that O’den had ever seen. Arms as thick as a smaller dwarf’s bulged out of his mustard tabard, only barely contained by the plain white undershirt beneath. His black, close-cropped hair added to the statuesque sternness of his pursed lips and focused, piercing blue eyes.

  Out of the corner of his eye, O’den caught Bannick open his mouth to speak, but a quick silencing gesture from the captain forced the boy’s jaw closed so fast anyone who didn’t know better might mistake Odo for an arcanist. “You three: out.”