The sun rose fully, and he began to hear the tell-tale sounds of a siege being executed across Steinvic – shouts, the bustle of activity and, just audible, the thud and crack of stone hitting stone at speed. There seemed to be a growing possibility that Bellacon might get inside before him. He continued to fret.
Finally, after an age had passed and nothing seemed to have visibly changed, the engineers shuffled through the water, upstream, to Cantex’s position near the western exit, and nodded. The tribune looked back past them at the six ropes that led away from his hands, trailing in the water until they passed beneath the iron bar and then rose into the gloom of the tunnel roof.
‘I thought just taking out the rest of the bars would probably do it,’ he whispered to the nearest engineer, who treated him to a look that suggested the man felt like he was trying to explain military tactics to a puppy.
‘That might just bring the facing away, sir, yes. But we want more than that.’
‘Do we?’
‘Did you not ask us to bring the rampart down, sir?’
‘Well, yes.’ Cantex could feel his irritation growing and forced himself to keep his voice to the quietest of murmurs.
‘Well there is more to a rampart, sir, than the flashy stone facing wall and parapet. This is a stone and clay core with compacted earth some decades old – possibly more than a century – and with a turf inner, a timber upper walkway and outer stone revetment. That, sir, is the rampart.’
It simply wasn’t worth arguing. So long as he got inside.
‘We won’t be able to put much strength into the tug while we’re in the water,’ he noted, ‘and I doubt we’ll get much further away without being used for arrow practice.’
‘It won’t need much of a tug, sir. In fact, I’d be a lot more comfortable if you’d leave a bit more slack than that, just in case.’ The engineer’s tone was getting a little loud, with excitement or fear. It was often hard to tell the difference with his kind.
Cantex frowned and sighed. ‘Are we ready, then?’
‘We’re ready, sir.’
Making sure to leave ample slack in the rope, Cantex turned and peered myopically out into the western light. Even knowing the scout was there, it took him considerable time to locate the man in the trees, crouched near the edge of the grass and watching intently.
Cantex gave the signal half a dozen times before the man noticed and scurried off through the woodland. That was it. Things were in motion. It was a good plan. In fact, it was a magnificent plan. Worthy of…
His teeth ground. Every time he thought of his friend in the queen’s hall, dying with the bitch’s blade through his throat, his mood slid a little further into the underworld. Cantex knew enough of the way the world worked, and the way the heart worked too, to know that revenge never healed a wound.
The hole left in his life by the loss of his oldest friend would never be filled, but still the queen’s continued existence hung over him like a nagging itch, impossible to scratch.
He would scratch it. Damn certain, he would scratch it.
And soon.
After a while the watcher returned to the treeline, confirming that the message had been sent. An hour passed, and then another. Cantex began to worry that something had gone wrong at the south. Would they find out if that was the case? What if the queen had sallied forth with her army to meet Bellacon in the field?
His other old friend might be fighting for his life, watching his army being slaughtered, all while Cantex and the engineers sat, soggy and silent in a tunnel, waiting for an order that would never come. What if the order had been given and the watchers in place out there hadn’t seen the signal?
He almost exploded with relief when the signal came. The man at the treeline made subtle gestures to pass on the message. From the wall top, through the foliage of the trees, the movement would be virtually invisible. If Cantex hadn’t been waiting for them, he might even have missed them himself.
He turned and gestured to the others. Time to go. He hoped they’d left plenty of slack further along in the ropes, despite what they’d said earlier about him needing to loosen it. This could be a very short assault, at least for the six of them, if the engineers had messed it up.
They seemed to be waiting for him to make the first move. As he tensed himself, ready to go, he could just make out the increased pace and volume from across Steinvic, where Bellacon had fully committed.
With another nod to the engineers, Cantex grasped the rope and moved to the very edge of the tunnel, between the scant remains of the upright poles. There, he cast up a quick prayer and slid into the deeper water. Here he would not be readily visible from the parapet unless the defenders happened to be leaning over and looking down. Clenching his teeth to prevent them from chattering noisily, he submerged himself to the neck and moved to the side, clearing the tunnel entrance.
The first engineer appeared similarly neck-deep and moved into position opposite. The others followed in order, until all six of them were in the pool and just below the wall itself. He nodded to them, they all nodded back, and the half dozen interlopers began to move slowly through the water. The lowest level of movement and surface disruption seemed the best way.
Cantex was almost halfway across the pool when they were spotted. Shouts were raised atop the wall, and in moments spears and rocks were hurled down at them. The six men began to swim as fast as they could now, all thought of stealth gone. There seemed to be no arrows. Likely most of the archers had been pulled to the south-west rampart to deal with Bellacon’s push, just as they’d expected.
It took the tribune by surprise when the rope in his hand reached its full extent. It had been so slack he’d hardly been aware he was still bearing it. Then suddenly it was taut and jerked him to a halt. Desperate to get out of the way of the potential rain of death from the wall top, he yanked the rope.
It came free easier than he’d expected, and he was about to swim away to safety when the first two engineers fell. One took a thrown javelin in the back as he swam, crying out for only a moment before the pool swallowed him, the water around the rippling surface beginning to take on a pink tinge. The other man was struck on the back of the head with a particularly well-thrown rock, sinking instantly.
The engineer who’d tried to explain things to him earlier turned, having tugged free his own rope, and swam back towards the deadly missiles and the spot where the last man and the rock that had killed him had disappeared. Cantex looked to the widening and deepening pink stain and realised he could see the frayed end of a rope wavering about on the surface.
Hardening himself against the danger, he dived back across the pool, hands flailing for the rope. A spear broke the surface a few feet from his face and, as his gaze flicked up to the wall, he could see archers arriving on the parapet.
His fingers closed on the rope. He pulled.
There was a sound like a titan complaining in a subterranean hall, and all sound and movement seemed to stop for a single moment. His eyes met those of the other engineer, who was holding up the end of another limp rope. An arrow thrummed past the engineer’s face by a mere hand-span, and then all the missiles stopped.
Almost in slow motion, Cantex’s gaze spun back to the wall.
A section of rampart some fifty paces long suddenly bucked, throwing all the figures atop it from their feet. It shifted again for a moment.
And then it collapsed.
It was magnificent.
Cantex could remember as a boy in the city of Rilva watching engineers destroying a building that had become unstable during a tremor. The great big hall of the priests’ college had been surrounded by temples and houses and shops and inns, and yet the engineers had done their job so admirably that when the building collapsed it was perfectly controlled, falling in upon itself rather than outwards, where it could damage its surroundings. Moments later all there had been was a square of rubble with a massive cloud of dust, surrounded by perfectly intact buildings. It had been l
ike the hand of a god at work.
This was the same. The central, high, section of the rampart sank first, the embankment collapsing inwards towards the middle. The only part that did not follow that plan was the stone revetment that collapsed outwards into the pool with an enormous splash.
Cantex was knocked onto his backside by a surprisingly strong wave caused by the falling stonework and rose again, spluttering, from the freezing water, to see only a huge cloud of dust and dirt billowing through the air on the far side of the pool.
He was too dazed to give the signal, but it appeared that he did not need to.
As the cloud gradually settled to reveal that the entire fifty-pace section of rampart was now little more than the height of a man, its surface lumpy and rubble-dotted, a roar arose from the woods behind. The tribune pushed for the stream’s bank at the edge of the pool, where he clambered up out of the water, shivering uncontrollably. And before he could even draw breath, several thousand warriors swept past him, howling and bellowing in their guttural tongue.
He thought he saw Prince Suolceno briefly amid the press of the rebel heir’s army. The Albantes who had followed their prince into his treaty with the empire swept across the turf and up onto the collapsed rampart where the stunned defenders were only now beginning to rise, injured and confused. Other rebel natives simply waded into the water in an effort to get to the wall and inside, to kill those men loyal to the queen.
The queen.
Cantex ran over to the treeline. One of the imperial scouts, probably the one who’d been doing all the signalling, was holding up a thick wool cloak for him to dry himself. He ignored it, reaching down instead for his sword which lay propped against a tree along with fresh, dry clothes and his armour. Eschewing them all, he gripped his blade and turned, running back to the wall he’d just collapsed.
Steinvic was falling. Somewhere in there, Queen Verctissa would be waiting, and Cantex owed her a debt. His face stern, he drew his sword and cast the sheath away as he ran.
Chapter 30
Whatever the siege was like over in the south-west, the action at the collapsed stream tunnel was chaos. Of course, Cantex had expected nothing less. Releasing a baying horde of Albante warriors to face another baying horde of Albante warriors just stank of chaos from the very outset.
Even as the invaders moved to cross the collapsed wall, the enemy showed that they had been better prepared than they had initially appeared. A sizeable force of natives had been ready and armed in the residential quarter, and as soon as the rampart had been destroyed, they had poured out from the dirt streets between wattle and daub houses and log huts, waving swords and bellowing.
The defenders had managed to rally enough men, in fact, to keep the attackers contained at the breach, though they were having to fight hard to do it, and every now and then a small group of the prince’s men would get through behind them.
But the true chaos began once the two sides had engaged in full battle over the tumbled walls of Steinvic.
The problem – the blessing? – was that they were all dressed alike. They all looked alike. Because the prince’s force was a native war band and not an organised army they relied on simple honks from their strange horns, and on shouted orders, just like the queen’s men. They spoke the same language, had similar shields, used the same weapons. And once they were in the press of men, the queen’s warriors were prey to their blood lust, laying into the men around them with gay abandon, killing as many of their own as the enemy, unable to tell them apart even as the death blow landed.
The prince’s men, conversely, were efficiently butchering the queen’s. Each of them bore a simple red ribbon around their upper right arm. The result was simple: kill anyone without such a ribbon. Unless the enemy were idiots sooner or later the distinction would become clear to them and things would polarise, but for now the chaos was all one-sided.
The queen’s men were dying in droves, killing one another as often as they killed the enemy. Moreover, the men who escaped past the defenders into Steinvic itself, rather than running amok, killing and burning and looting, had turned on the rear ranks of the defenders who were still arriving from the town, killing them and initiating the same chaos there, as the reinforcements, in confusion, began to kill each other before they even reached the rampart.
Cantex nodded in bitter satisfaction. The loss of Convocus had been far too high a price to pay, but in addition to the ambassadors one good thing had come out of their foray into the place: the realisation that the stream tunnel was a weak point where the walls could be collapsed.
The west of Steinvic was falling. The process was slow at the moment, but soon the enemy there would be too few to keep the prince’s men outside and they would flood Steinvic. Then the commanders would learn whether the war band had maintained any level of discipline.
It was in the nature of tribal war to rape, kill or enslave the civilians, to fire anywhere important or defensible, and to loot without conscience or mercy, but the prince had expressly forbidden his army from any such activity, and so had Bellacon. This was the prince’s tribe even if they fought for his mother, and he wanted his town, his people, and the possessions intact after the battle.
Cantex stood on a particularly high section of the collapsed wall, his feet slipping on the loose stones and rubble, trying to see across the melee. As he focused, suddenly a man was in front of him, running and with a sword raised above his head. The native snapped off a stream of angry war words and chopped down with his blade.
Cantex ducked to the side, meaning to reply with a stab at gut height, but the broken rocks below caused him to lose his footing and he slid away to the side, out of danger, unable to see the man any longer in the growing press of men. A sword almost punched into him, held back at the last moment as a warrior with a red ribbon realised who he was. Cantex rolled his eyes. In his hurry to run into the fray and hunt the queen, he’d forgotten to pick up the red ribbon among his dry clothes.
Another enemy came at him and he parried the coming blow with difficulty, but recovered quickly, making sure his footing was better this time. His return strike took the man in the inner thigh, slicing down at a diagonal angle through skin and muscle and that artery that all soldiers knew would bleed a man out in thirty heartbeats if cut right.
A spear point took a nick out of his earlobe, causing him to curse violently in the imperial tongue. Desperately he lashed out again and again at the enemy. Anyone without a red ribbon, and once or twice even men who did bear one, but who were intent on his death anyway. And suddenly, through the press, he saw his opportunity. Like a forest track carved by the repeated passage of an animal, arched over and almost tunnel-like with foliage, there was a way through the press of men.
Cantex ran forward. He felt blows land on him three times as he ran, pushing between men, unsure whether they were friend or enemy at any point. His head took a glancing clout from a spear shaft, which did little damage other than a long abrasion, but which momentarily rocked him, stealing his wits. A blade nicked his leg as he ran, causing a line of pain across his thigh just above the knee. And he felt something cut a painful slash along one of the ribs on his lower left side. Pain, but nothing unmanageable.
Moments later he was in the open and running. He staggered to a halt and leaned forward, spitting out thick drool as his shaken brains recovered. With a jerk he threw up and then, shaking, straightened. The confusion his knock to the head had caused was fading rapidly. Men were running at him. How had he got turned around?
He spun, almost falling and throwing up again, only to see the press of battle going on behind him. So if those running warriors weren’t the men at the rampart…?
He turned once more. Perhaps a dozen men were hurtling towards him, bellowing. More reinforcements, obviously. He was on the edge of the township, and the men must have emerged from one of the streets only to find a single imperial soldier running at them. Damn it, that was idiotic.
He dithered. There
was no way on his best day he could take on twelve men. Even three would be a heroic feat. Twelve? He looked over his shoulder. He could run back into the press again, but that was probably suicide too, and would just take him further from the queen again.
‘Are you that eager to die, sir?’ called a voice. He glanced around again. A small group of men had emerged from the press and were closing on him. Some were natives with red ribbons, but there were also two of the scouts and the engineer who’d been concerned he was holding his rope too tight. The latter had been the speaker.
He had no time to answer. The dozen enemy reinforcements were on him. Aware of his peril, he dodged to his left, so that he was at one edge of their group, parried the first blow, punched out with his sword and then slashed on the withdrawal, striking the flesh of two different men with the two strikes. A sword hissed past him, ripping the tunic at his shoulder. The whole group of the enemies turned on him, but the engineer and his friends were suddenly there, and once again life became a fraught melee.
For what felt like an hour Cantex swung and spun, dodged and parried, lashed out, slashed out, stabbed and hacked, head-butted and punched, trod and kicked, the men around him all doing the same, whether friend or foe. Eventually, the tribune suddenly staggered backwards out of the way of a spear only to find himself in a small open space. The battle was no less chaotic than it had been in its opening moments, but the scale had spread. Now that the prince’s army was all committed, most of it on or inside the walls, this entire side of Steinvic had become one huge melee.
Even where the terrain looked remotely open, it was in truth filled with smaller groups struggling with one another. More men seemed to be coming from the township’s filthy streets, and from the sound of it the south-west was now being hard fought.
Invasion (Tales of the Empire Book 5) Page 33
