by David Weber
His northern column wavered, and Vrikadan charged through the smoke, bouncing off wounded men, beating at stragglers with the flat of his blade.
"Keep your ranks!" he bellowed. "Keep your ranks, damn you!"
A wild-eyed under-captain recognized him and wheeled on his own men, quelling their panic. Vrikadan shouldered up beside the younger man, waving his sword while the lead company of the stalled phalanx stared at him.
"With me, lads!" he screamed, and dashed forward like a man possessed.
* * *
Smoke blinded Tamman, and he switched his vision to thermal imaging. The image was blurry, and he could no longer see the range stakes, but a mass of men was almost to the east bank. He sent a runner forward.
* * *
Vrikadan's lips drew back in a snarl as a ray of sunlight pierced the smoke and the river glistened before him. Grapeshot heaped his men in ugly, writhing tangles, but the weight of numbers behind them was an avalanche. They couldn't stop—they couldn't be stopped!—and the water beckoned.
And then, just as he reached the bank, the smoke lifted on a billow of flame. There were gun pits at the feet of the redoubts! Camouflaged pits filled not with arlaks but with chagors, light guns packed hub-to-hub and spewing fire.
He had only an instant to see it before a charge of grape ripped both legs off at the hip.
* * *
Sean swallowed again, cringing inwardly as he watched through Sandy's scanners and saw the east bank of the Mortan writhe with screaming, broken bodies... and saw living men advancing through the horror.
God in Heaven, how could they do that? He knew the momentum of the men behind drove them forward, giving them no choice, but it was more than that, too. It was unreasoning, blood-mad insanity and it was courage, and there was no longer any difference between them.
They were going to reach the fords despite Tamman's guns, and he hadn't really believed they could.
* * *
The first Guardsmen splashed into the river. It ran scarlet as case shot flailed at them, but they came on. High-Captain Lornar saw Lord Tamman's slender sword rise above his head and blew his whistle, and more whistles shrilled up and down the fighting step. Three thousand rifled joharns were leveled across the rampart, and Lord Tamman's sword hissed down.
* * *
The leading pikemen were still three hundred paces away when a sheet of lead slashed through them like fiery sleet. Whole companies went down, and those following stared in horror at the writhing carpet of their companions and the isolated individuals who still stood, stunned by the density of the volley. They wavered, but High-Captain Martas' men were on their heels, driving them forward. There was nowhere to go but into those flaming muzzles, and they lowered their pikes and charged.
* * *
The first three thousand musketeers reached for cartridges and stepped down from the fighting step, and three thousand more replaced them. Ramrods clinked and jerked, whistles screamed again, and a second stupendous volley smashed out. Sergeants shouted, bellowing to control the lethal ballet, and the musketeers exchanged places again. The first group's reloaded joharns leveled, and lightning sheeted across the rampart once more.
* * *
Lord Rokas paled as the roar of massive volleys drowned even the artillery. With no way to know how quickly Tamman's men could reload, those steady, crashing discharges could only mean the heretics had far more muskets than he'd believed possible.
He couldn't see through the wall of smoke, but experience told him what had happened to Vrikadan—and that Martas was moving into the maelstrom, with High-Captain Sertal on his heels. Those fords were mincing machines, devouring his troops, yet they were also the only way into Yortown, and he banished all expression as he barked out orders to send even more of the Guard to their deaths.
High-Captain Martas's men burst through the smoke. Bodies littered the riverbank, but the heretics' guns and muskets had been too busy dealing with Vrikadan's men to ravage Martas's companies. Now they lunged for the river, for their only salvation lay in reaching and silencing those redoubts.
They began to die as more volleys roared, and their fellows stumbled forward over their bodies, floundering and cursing in the shallows, wading deeper, crouching to hide as much of themselves below the water as they could.
And then the lead ranks lunged upright, screaming as the rear ranks drove them forward onto the sharpened stakes and needle-pointed caltrops hidden in the river. They thrashed and shrieked in the scarlet water, and the deadly waves of musketry ripped them to pieces.
Round shot hissed overhead or thudded into the earthwork as the Host's guns scrambled into action, and one of them slammed into the arlak beside Tamman. The barrel spun away, the carriage disintegrated, and something less than human twitched and mewled amid the wreckage. His guns were protected by the redoubt's embrasures, but they were also outnumbered. More and more of the Guard's artillery was coming into action between the bleeding infantry columns, and musketeers stood fully exposed on the flanks to fire into the smoke. They were shooting blind at extreme range, but even with their low rates of fire, an awesome number of balls buzzed overhead.
He stared down into the carnage of the ford. Pikemen and musketeers waded out into that madness, advancing until grapeshot or musket balls hammered them under, but the men behind them were stopping at last. Or were they? He strained his eyes and swallowed. They weren't stopping; they were reforming.
* * *
High-Captain Sertal's face was white under its dust and grime, but his hoarse voice cut through the din. His forward companies absorbed the survivors of Vrikadan's and Martas's men, standing with iron discipline under the tornado of the heretics' fire. Under-captains and sergeants shouted orders. Where necessary, they kicked troopers into formation with boots caked in bloody mud, and Sertal winced as another deadly lash of grapeshot scythed through his men. He couldn't hold them here long, but he had to hold them long enough to reorder their ranks, and he gripped his sword and coughed on smoke, listening to the screams.
* * *
Sean checked the scanners once more as the zone south of the High Road became a solid mass of advancing Guardsmen, then nodded to Tibold.
"They're stuck in deep," he said, trying to hide his anxiety, "and Rokas is sending his reserves forward. It's time."
"Aye, Lord Sean!" Tibold began snapping orders, and twenty thousand men, without a single pike among them, rose to their feet in the "impassable" woods north of the Host.
* * *
Now!
Sertal thrust his sword at the redoubts and swept it down in command, and his men lurched into the holocaust. Tamman saw them coming and turned to shout another order to Lornar, but Lornar was down, head smashed by one of those blind-fired musket balls. He grabbed a captain's shoulder. The Malagoran's face—it was Captain Ithun, one of the ex-Guard officers—was white and strained, and he went still whiter as he realized he was now Tamman's senior officer in the central redoubt. Tamman saw it, but there was no time for encouragement.
"Pikes forward!" he bellowed.
* * *
The chagors in Tamman's advanced gun pits fired one last salvo, and their crews snatched for swords and pikes as the bleeding ranks of the Guard won free of the water at last. A dozen gun captains paused to light fuses before they grabbed up their own weapons, and the madmen who'd fought their way through everything the Malagorans could throw lunged towards them with a howl. Fresh concussions turned howls to screams as the crude mines seeded the river bank in fountains of flame and flying limbs, and the survivors wavered, but Sertal's men drove forward, and edged steel stabbed and cut.
Malagoran pikemen funneled through sally ports in their earthworks and foamed over the foremost Guardsmen behind the high, quavering Malagoran yell, then crashed into the ranks behind them. They thrust forward, bills rising and falling, shearing limbs and plucking heads, and hurled the Host back into the fords, but there they stopped. The hand-to-hand butchery blocked the
chagors, and the arlaks were locked in a duel with the Guard's gun lines. Musketry continued to crash out above their heads, yet the Host was taking fewer fire casualties now, and the lead formations had cleared most of the obstacles with their own bodies. Thousands of Guardsmen lay dead or wounded, but more pressed forward, and sheer weight of numbers began to drive the Malagorans back.
* * *
Captain Yurkal stared south at the clouds of smoke, listening to the artillery and crashing musketry. The screams were faint with distance, a savage sound under the explosions, and he was guiltily aware of his own relief at being spared that hell. Yurkal was a son of Mother Church, but he was also grateful his dragoons had been deployed so far from the fighting, and—
He jerked in astonishment as his banner-bearer fell, clawing at his chest. There was a meaty thud as the sergeant beside him slid to the ground as well, and Yurkal whirled as the popping sounds behind him registered.
Three hundred paces away, still hidden in the edge of the forest, a green-and-brown-clad marksman settled his rifled malagor into its rest and peered through his peep sight. He squeezed the trigger, and a twenty-millimeter bullet blew Captain Yurkal's heart apart.
* * *
Sean watched the snipers methodically pick off officers and noncoms while the rest of his men debouched from the forest. It wasn't chivalrous... but, then, neither was war.
More officers fell, and suddenly leaderless troopers began to panic. Most were already fleeing, and the pairs of malagors continued to fire, cutting down the handful of Guardsmen who stood while leather-lunged sergeants cursed their own men into formation.
Fifteen thousand men formed a three-deep battle line three kilometers long. The Malagoran yell quivered down their front, and they swept south, and five thousand more followed as a reserve.
* * *
Lord Marshal Rokas's head snapped up at the crackle of musketry. He spun to the north and gaped as a new wall of smoke billowed. Impossible!
He jerked his spyglass open, and his blood ran chill. His mounted screen had dissolved like leaves in a tempest, and even as he watched the advancing lines of muzzle flashes ripped at the fugitives' backs.
A trap. This entire position was a trap, and he'd walked right into it! Tibold had done the unthinkable, splitting his outnumbered forces, deploying those oncoming musketeers in a position from which they couldn't possibly retreat in order to hit him when he was mired in the fords!
The plan's insane audacity stunned him, but half his total force was committed to the lunge at the fords. Another quarter had been left behind, lest it constrict his movement. That left barely thirty thousand men to meet this new threat, and they were spread out behind his attacking formations.
He leapt onto his branahlk, spurring down the hill even as he began volleying orders, and signals and couriers exploded in every direction in a deadly race against that advancing horde of heretical musketeers.
Another isolated company disintegrated under the rolling fire of Sean's battle-line, and his pulse pounded. His men couldn't move as quickly in line as in column, but the hours of drill were bearing fruit. Their formation was perfect, and they advanced like automatons, reloading on the move. Their fire swept the trampled crop land before them like a lethal broom, and he could see the panicky movement of Rokas's reserves ahead of them.
* * *
The carnage in the fords drove inexorably towards the redoubts, for the Guardsmen there had no way of knowing what was descending upon their flank. Sixty thousand men clawed their way forward. Only a fraction of them could reach the fords at any given moment, yet the numbers behind them seemed inexhaustible. The Malagorans fought back with equal ferocity, but they, too, were dying, and there were less of them.
The whistles shrilled again, and the Guard forged ahead with a bellow. But the Malagorans weren't breaking. They fell back, step by step, into the redoubts under cover of their musketeers, and Tamman watched anxiously.
Sean had to cross ten more kilometers of open ground to reach the fords.
* * *
Rokas's orders began to reach their destinations, and a shudder pulsed through the Host. The sudden threat to their "secure" flank mingled with the slaughter at the fords and woke a shiver of dread. Their enemies served the forces of Hell—was that how they'd managed this impossible maneuver?
But there was no time to think of such things with that battle-line sweeping down upon them. Companies wheeled, nioharq-drawn batteries lumbered to new positions, and an answering formation began to coalesce. It was shaken and uncertain, but it was there, and Rokas allowed himself to hope.
* * *
Sean watched the patterns shift, and his own orders raced up and down the line. He had no artillery... but, then, the Guard artillerists weren't used to muskets which could kill them at eight hundred meters, either.
A forlorn hope of musketeers tried to slow him, and perhaps a hundred of his own men went down. Then the fire of his line tore the defenders apart, and the inexorable advance swept over them.
* * *
The hand-to-hand fighting reached the redoubts, and screams bubbled as Guardsmen tumbled into the ditches at their feet and died on the waiting stakes. Their fellows advanced over them, marching across their writhing bodies, too frenzied even to realize what they were doing.
The musketeers fired one last volley and fell back to clear the fighting step. Pikes and bills crossed at the ramparts, and Tamman knew he should go with the marksmen, but Lornar was dead. His men were fighting like demons, yet it all hinged on their morale, and if he seemed to waver...
A pikeman leapt up a pile of bodies, thrusting at him, and his left hand darted out with inhuman quickness. He caught the pike haft, enhanced muscles jerked, and the Guardsman clung in disbelief as he was wrenched in close.
A battle steel blade hissed, and a head bounded away.
* * *
Two batteries of arlaks unlimbered, and the gunners wheeled their pieces frantically into position to stem the heretics' advance. They were six hundred paces from the enemy, three times effective malagor range—and they died in deep astonishment as the crackling fire killed them anyway.
* * *
The second wave of attackers was thrown back, but a third formed and crashed forward over the bodies, and the man beside Tamman went down screaming with a pikehead in his guts. Tamman lunged at his killer, grunting as his slender sword punched through breast and backplate alike, and kicked the body aside, then grunted again as a musket ball smashed into his own breastplate. It whined aside, marking the undented Imperial composite with a long smear of lead, and he cut down two more Guardsmen. But this time the bastards were coming through, and his free hand ripped a mace from a dead man's belt as the defending line crumbled to his left.
"Follow me!" he bellowed, and sensed the rush of his men behind him as he hurtled to meet the penetration.
* * *
Sean's line swept over the guns and the bodies of their crews, and a hungry roar went up as his men saw the first pike blocks formed across their path. His own pipes screamed, wailing their fury, and his amplified voice bellowed through the din.
"Halt!"
Fifteen thousand men paused as one, and the waiting Guardsmen's pikes swung down into a leveled glitter of steel.
"Front rank, kneel!"
Five thousand men went to one knee, shouldering their muskets as the Guard's drums thundered and the charge began. Seven or eight thousand men swept forward, shrieking their battlecries, and he watched them come.
Three hundred meters. Two hundred.
"Take aim!"
One hundred. Seventy-five. Fifty.
"By ranks—fire!"
A sheet of flame rolled down his kneeling rank, and the front of the pike blocks collapsed in hideous ruin. Men stumbled and sprawled over the bodies of their fellows as the charge wavered, and the second rank fired. A third of the Guardsmen were down, and the charge slithered to a halt as the hurricane blast swept over them... and the thir
d rank fired!
The surviving pikemen hurled away their weapons and fled.
* * *
Captain Ithun watched his company reel back as the Guard swept over the parapet. Its men wavered, shaken by the terror thundering about them and ready to flee, then stared in disbelief as Lord Tamman charged the enemy's flank. The fighting step was wide enough for five men abreast, but there was no one beside him, for he'd outdistanced them all... and it didn't matter.
Ithun gaped as the black-armored figure erupted into the Guardsmen, mace in one hand, skinny sword in the other. No Pardalian had faced a fully enhanced enemy in forty-five thousand years, and any Guardsman who'd doubted the heretics were allied to demons knew better now. Limbs and dead men exploded from Lord Tamman's path. A pike lunged at him, and metal screamed as that impossible sword sheared through the pikehead.
"Come on, Malagorans!" Ithun shrieked, and his men roared as they swept back up the fighting step in his wake.
* * *
It was over, Rokas thought remotely.
A line of fire ground down from the north in a haze of powder smoke, shattering everything in its path and crunching over the wreckage. No army in the world could advance like that, not without a single polearm, but the heretics were doing it, and his men refused to face them.
He stood numbly, watching the Host disintegrate as his men threw away their weapons and bolted, and he couldn't blame them. There was something dreadful about that deliberate, remorseless advance—something that proved the tales of demons—and all of Mother Church's exorcisms couldn't stop it.
An aide jerked at him, shouting about withdrawal, and Rokas turned like a man in a nightmare, then gasped as a fiery hammer smashed his side.
The lord marshal fell to his knees, and the tumult about him had grown suddenly faint. He rolled onto his back, staring up at his panicked aide and the smoke-streaked sky, and his dimming mind marveled that evening had come so soon.
