by David Weber
"Time?" Vroxhan repeated sharply, and Surak nodded grimly.
"The rest of their army's about to assault North Gate, Holiness, and at your orders, we didn't tell the men on the wall what we intended, either."
"You mean they may actually break into the Temple?!" Vroxhan gasped.
"I mean, Holiness, that our guns are manned and we're rushing in more infantry, but if they hit fast enough, they may get through the tunnel before we can ready the oil. If that happens, then, yes, they can break in."
"Dear God!" Vroxhan whispered, and it was the lord marshal's turn to smile. It was a grim smile, but it wasn't defeated.
"Holiness, I would never have chosen to fight them here, but it may actually work in our favor." Vroxhan looked at him in disbelief, and the lord marshal made an impatient gesture. "Holiness, I've told you again and again: it's their range and firepower that makes them so dangerous in the field. Well, there's no open terrain in the Temple. The streets will break up their firing lines, every building will become a strong point, and they'll have to come at us head-on, with bayonets against our pikes. This may be the best chance we'll ever have to crush their main field army, and if we do, we can capture their weapons and find out how they've improved their range and rates of fire."
Vroxhan blinked, and then his face smoothed as understanding struck.
"Exactly, Holiness. If we hold them here, smash this army, copy their weapons, and then concentrate our own strength from other areas, we can win this war after all."
"I—" Vroxhan began, then stiffened at the sudden, brazen bellow of far more artillery than North Gate's defenders could bring to bear.
A wall of smoke spewed upward as the arlaks recoiled, and splinters flew as their shot smashed into the city gates. Scores of holes appeared in the stout timbers, but they held, and the gunners sprang into the deadly ballet Lord Sean and Lord Tamman had taught them. Sponges hissed down bores, bagged charges and fresh shot followed, and the guns roared again.
The defending artillery fired in desperate counterbattery, but fewer guns could be crammed in along the walls, they couldn't match the Malagorans' rate of fire, and the wind carried the thick clouds of smoke up towards them in a solid, blinding bank. The Guard's guns could kill and maim Tibold's gunners, but they couldn't silence his pieces, and the gates sagged as hurricanes of eight-kilo shot smashed them. The outermost portcullis and gate went down in ruins, but the gunners went on firing, pouring a maelstrom of shot down the narrow gullet of the gate tunnel. Tibold could no more see what was happening to the second and third gates than the next man, but that massive barrage had to be ripping them apart in turn.
He paced back and forth, gnawing his lip and trying to gauge his moment. If he waited too long, the defenders would be ready to deluge his men with oil; if he committed his column too soon, it would find itself halted by intact gates, and aside from hastily impressed wagon tongues, it had no battering rams. The losses he was going to take from the wall's artillery as he charged would be terrible; if his men had to retreat under fire from a gate they couldn't breach, they would also be useless.
Another salvo rolled out from his gun line, and another. Another. He paced harder, hovering on the brink of committing himself and then dragging himself back. He had to wait. Wait as long as he dared to be sure—
He jerked in pain as the "com" on his wrist suddenly bit him. He snatched his hand up in front of him, staring at the bracelet, and the Angel Harry's taut voice came from it.
"The middle gate must be down, Tibold! We can see shot coming through the innermost ones, and they're hanging by a thread!"
See them? How could even an angel see—? He bit off the extraneous question and held the com to his lips.
"What else can you see, Lady Harry?" he demanded.
"They've got a line of infantry waiting for you." Harriet deliberately spoke in a flat, clear voice despite her fear for Sean while she relayed the reports from Brashan's hastily redeployed orbital arrays. "It looks like two or three thousand pikes, but only a few hundred musketeers. They've brought up a battery—we can't tell if they're chagors or arlaks—in support. That's all so far, but more guns and men will be there within twenty minutes. If you're going, you have to go now, Tibold!"
The head of Tibold's column was the Twelfth Brigade. Its men stood two hundred meters behind their own guns, and they were white-faced and taut, for they understood the carnage waiting in and beyond that narrow tunnel. There were none of the usual jokes and anxious banter men used to hide their fear from one another. This time they stood silent, each man isolated in his own small world of gnawing tension despite the men standing at his shoulders. The thunder of their own guns pulsed in their blood like the beating of someone else's heart, and already they had over a hundred dead and wounded from the arlaks on the Temple's wall. They were too far out for grapeshot, and the defenders had been concentrating on efforts to silence Tibold's artillery, but that was going to change the instant the infantry started forward.
Their heads jerked up as High-Captain Tibold appeared before them. He faced them with blazing eyes, and his leather-lunged bellow cut through even the thunder of the guns.
"Malagorans!" he shouted. "You know all Lord Sean and the angels have done for us; now he, Lord Tamman, and the Angel Sandy have been betrayed! Unless we cut our way to them, they, and all our comrades with them, will die! Men of the Twelfth, will you let that happen?"
"NOOO!" the Twelfth roared, and Tibold drew his sword.
"Then let's go get them out! Twelfth Brigade, at a walk, advance!"
Whistles shrilled, pipes began to wail, and the men of the Twelfth gripped their rifles in sweat-slick hands and moved forward.
The artillerists on the walls didn't notice them at first. Smoke clogged visibility, and the thunder of their own guns covered the whistles and the drone of the pipes. But the Malagoran arlaks had to check fire as the advancing infantry masked their fire, and the Guard knew then. Powder-grimed gunners relaid their pieces, grapeshot replaced round, and they waited for the smoke to lift and give them a target.
"Double time!" the Twelfth's officers screamed, and the column picked up speed. They had six hundred paces to go, and they moved forward at a hundred and thirty paces a minute as the wind parted the smoke.
The defenders watched them come, and musketeers dashed along the wall, spreading out between the guns. The Guard didn't have many of them left, but four hundred settled into firing position and checked their priming as the Twelfth's advance accelerated. Six hundred paces. Five hundred. Four.
"Malagor and Lord Sean!" the Twelfth's commander bellowed, and his men howled the high, terrible Malagoran yell and sprang into a full run.
A curtain of flame blasted out from the wall, twenty guns spewing grapeshot into a packed formation at a range of barely three hundred meters. Hundreds of men went down as quarter-kilo buckshot smashed through them, but other men hurdled their shattered bodies at a dead run, and their speed took them in under the artillery's maximum depression before the gunners could reload. Guard musketeers leaned out over the parapet, exposing themselves to fire straight down into them as they reached the base of the wall, and the artillery poured fresh fire into the men behind them, but six full regiments of riflemen laced the battlements with suppressive fire. Scores of Guard musketeers died, and artillerists began to fall, as well, as bullets swept their embrasures. Fresh smoke turned morning into Hell's own twilight, men screamed and cursed and died, and the Twelfth Brigade's bleeding battalions slammed into the shot-riddled outer gate.
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 bef
ore 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.
Chapter 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.