Pass of Fire

by Taylor Anderson

  Even as they suddenly fought for their lives—and each other’s—Chack and Silva realized how different this was, even from the fighting earlier that day, and that they’d been engulfed in the fiercest, wildest, most animalistic struggle either had ever known. Silva was battered and nipped by countless jabs and blows in that first great collision and managed to empty his Thompson twice more, spraying blood, bone, and brains away, practically at the muzzle. There was no time or opportunity to reload after that. He couldn’t even sling the weapon and had to drop it again. He instantly reverted to his weapons of choice in such intimate situations: his 1917 Navy cutlass and 1911 Colt .45.

  Chack’s Krag, with its ’03 Springfield bayonet, became a glorified spear again, with a razor-sharp blade on one end and a heavy, steel-shod club on the other. And it was wielded by a ’Cat who’d become an artist at killing with that combination. But this was tighter, more vicious even than the whirlwind at the point of the wedge, and Chack’s beloved old Krag, battered by Grik muskets, its stock cracked by the very skulls it crushed, slowly came apart in his hands. He finally let its shattered remains fall in the mud of a shell crater behind the breastworks, and drew his own pistol and cutlass.

  And so Chack and Silva fought, side by side, trying to cover each other while they loaded pistols or strained to free cutlasses jammed in Grik ribs. They hewed limbs, necks, heads; hacked away hands and fingers clutching bayonet-tipped muskets that probed for them; and blasted bloody holes in chests and open, ravening jaws. Bodies heaped before them. Yet ever so slowly, they—and the entire diminishing but still unbroken line—were pushed inexorably back from the breastworks, through the muddy trenches and shell holes, and onto the rain- and blood-slicked paving stones before the arched entrance to the Palace of Vanished Gods.

  This came with an unexpected advantage, however, since as the brigade contracted, its line thickened and the Grik numbers began to count for less, because fewer could come into contact. Maybe four machine guns still stuttered on the flanks by the palace, preventing the Grik from cutting them off, but two MGs had been overrun; their crews killed before they could retreat. And who knew how long the ammo would hold? ’Cats and Khonashi with Blitzers hosed down Grik trying to scale the slick sides of the palace itself and drop in behind them. Both light, stubby howitzers were still with them, pulling back, belching clouds of canister, but there couldn’t be many rounds left for them either.

  “We may haave to pull baack into the palaace,” Chack gasped, shouldering inside the reach of a Grik musket and hacking the wielder’s head half off, severing the spine. The Grik dropped like a stone, bright blood fountaining up under a sky still clearing, but dimmed by the low-hanging smoke and haze. Even the capricious wind had dropped almost to nothing, but it might’ve just shifted again and only been still in the lee of the palace. McIntyre was covering Silva’s left while he jammed another magazine in his mud- and blood-caked 1911, and Silva had to admit he was impressed with the Impie’s swordsmanship, weaving like a cobra to avoid thrusts or shots and jabbing deep in the press with the point of his blade, taking Grik in the chest, throat, or eyes.

  Silva was damn good with his cutlass; hacking, primarily, which was what it was best for, but he suspected he wouldn’t last a minute against McIntyre. He grinned. Unless I cheated. Dropping the slide, he pointed the 1911 at a Grik about to skewer Chack with a bayonet and blew the top of its head off. Two more shots killed more Grik beyond it. “We go in that hole, the battle’s over,” he warned. “Fine for us, ’cause even cut down as we are, I don’t think they can pry us out.” He paused to shoot more Grik and reloaded again. “They can burn us out. Smoke us out, anyhow,” he amended, “if they don’t care about the Sequesteral Fat Broad anymore.” He paused to hack down on a Grik musket barrel, and clawed fingers flew. He kicked the weapon aside and shot the Grik down the gullet even as its terrifying jaws snapped inches from his face. It coughed blood all over him and fell. “They must, though,” he continued, shooting another Grik climbing over the body, “’cause they seem pretty fixed on gettin’ in. Long as we keep fightin’, they stay glued to that. Sure, we’ll get a rest if we go in an’ hunker down, but we’ll be turnin’ these Grik loose to redeploy to the sides o’ the Cowflop an’ stand against Second Corps when it comes up!”

  They knew II Corps was behind them, east of the palace, offloading from the transports and shaking out as fast as it could. And nobody would speed that up faster than Safir Maraan. Maybe the Grik knew they were there too now, but were staying as packed up in front of Chack’s Brigade as they could, whether they could come to grips or not. Silva didn’t get it.

  Another musket barrel slammed down, glancing off his helmet. He caught it on his left forearm, pushed up, then stabbed the Grik that swung it in the chest. The clipped point of the cutlass avoided bone, like it did so well, and protruded from the Grik’s back for an instant before Silva jerked it out. Thing’s pretty good for pokin’ too, Silva conceded, but sometimes it gets stuck an’ you feel a weird kind o’ . . . quiverin’ in it when it does. . . . He spun and fired two shots into a Grik about to club McIntyre, and his slide locked back. That had been his last magazine. Deliberately, he shoved the filthy, smoking pistol in its holster and drew Captain Reddy’s nickel-plated Colt. Thing’s so pretty, I hate to use it in a mess like this, he lamented. But this is what it’s for, why the skipper made me keep it.

  That’s when he happened to glance at the river beyond the heaving mass of Grik that had pushed in between him and it. He blinked his good eye to clear the bloody, sweaty goo. It helped only a little, but there was no questioning what he saw. “Good God a’mighty!” he thundered. “There she is! Look, Chackie, just yonder!” He pointed his cutlass south.

  “I’m a little busy,” Chack shouted back, sarcasm thick even under his exhaustion.

  “Well finish up an’ look!” Silva demanded.

  Like a dreamed-for apparition under the haze-filtered sun, USS Walker’s battered gray shape was gliding into view. She was scorched and scraped and carried many new dents and scars. There were even a number of new holes here and there, but those were mostly in her thin funnels, as far as Silva could tell. But she, the big “163” standing tall and proud on her bow above the small wake she was making, and the huge Stars and Stripes battle flag whipping incongruously forward from her foremast, remained the most beautiful things in Silva’s world. Her machine guns and 25 mms aft of her torpedo tubes flickered unheard over the roar of battle, their tracers chopping at the Grik farthest away. Then, together, her numbers one, three, and four guns fired a salvo, and a tight trio of explosions erupted among the Grik mass. That was heard over the battle, and almost immediately Silva felt a shift in the press before him. He had to quit his gawking because the Grik were still fighting, pushing even harder, it seemed, but he could sense a subtle pressure to the right, and the Grik felt it too.

  “It’s Second Corps!” came a jubilant Lemurian yell, and Chack grabbed Silva hard with his left hand, his tired eyes suddenly wide and alight. “Safir has come! Attaacking on our right between the palaace and the city!”

  “Swell!” Silva shouted back, blasting a Grik with the shiny Colt. “Stay focused, Chackie. We ain’t done yet!”

  He was right. The enemy had known reinforcements were coming, had seen the powerful ships drawing near, and obviously expected Allied aircraft to appear at any time. That’s why they continued to fight so fiercely to stay so close. Besides their objective to secure their Celestial Mother, the remains of Chack’s Brigade was their protection from the water and the air. Unfortunately for them, they’d done their job too well and forced their imagined safeguard into too tight a knot, while underestimating the accuracy of the mighty guns on the water. All the warships on the river, besides the elements of Des-Ron 10 still covering the transports, slowly steamed past in a stately procession. Walker was first, followed by the similar-looking but comparatively huge USS Fitzhugh Gray. Then came USS Jame
s Ellis and the truncated USS Mahan. All looked battered by their journey up the Zambezi, the new dazzle paint schemes on all but Walker kind of smudged together now, making them look even worse. But their guns still worked and their rapid salvoes swept away great swaths of the Grik rear, firing so close on flat trajectories that the HE shells ripped through dozens of bodies before exploding and scouring scores more away in vast cones of destruction.

  The Grik pressed tighter against Chack’s Brigade, trying to escape the slaughter, and the fighting briefly became even more frantic, if that was possible. Once more, Silva and Chack were unable to even think about anything other than staying alive. The shiny Colt was empty. Too slow to reload right now, it was back in its holster. Silva had replaced it with the ’03 bayonet he always carried and fought now with a blade in each hand. He was uncomfortably aware that the last time he’d been forced to such extremes, he’d nearly bought it. Chack fought the same, with his cutlass and, somewhat awkwardly, a Grik blade he’d seized. But the roar of battle, of shooting, which had all but stopped around the palace arch, was growing, competing now even with the roar of guns on the water. And that was when another roar commenced that seemed to shake their very bones.

  It came from behind them, obviously, from somewhere in the palace, but it felt like it came from the sky as well and even the ground beneath their feet. The frequency was so low, so loud, that the sudden, booming drone almost overpowered the crack of Gray’s 5.5″ rifles and could probably be heard for miles. Clearly, it was a Grik horn of some kind, like they’d all heard on many battlefields, powered by bellows pressing air through pipes. But this noise had to come from a horn so immense that the bellows alone would probably fill one of Walker’s firerooms. Chack and Silva didn’t even try to talk, but they exchanged anxious looks. Grik horns had a purpose—other than just annoying or unnerving their opponents—and different tones represented distinct commands. The variety and complexity of those commands had increased as the war progressed, and new, more elaborate horns were made to convey them. And the meanings changed from time to time, like codes, after the Allies once used captured devices to sow confusion. But what did this all-encompassing tone mean, from a horn never meant for the battlefield? It had to be something very basic, very ancient, like the oldest Grik battle horns that only blew three notes, two of which commanded different methods of attack.

  To Chack’s and Silva’s utter amazement, the Grik in front of them, pressed so rabidly close only moments before, suddenly just . . . stopped. That resulted in a brief flurry of killing, of course, as Chack’s beleaguered troops merely continued what they’d been doing without thought for so long. But sooner than one might imagine, even without orders they couldn’t have heard if Chack thought to give them, even the most crazed, battle-mad ’Cats, men, and Khonashi began to halt their slaughter of Grik that only stood there, unresisting. Most would surely—happily—still flip any switch that would wipe out every Grik on earth, but regardless of what they’d been through and how they’d suffered, they just didn’t have it in them to keep killing helpless Grik face-to-face. They hadn’t sunk that low.

  Silva turned back to Chack, his blood-smeared face slack with fatigue and incomprehension as he mouthed the words, “What the shit?”

  Chack could only shake his head and stumble against the big man as all his strength seemed to drain away. Silva, McIntyre, and Abel Cook—Where did he come from? He should be on the faar right. Of course, the right isn’t very faar now—were suddenly holding him up. All else he could focus on was that Safir was here, and Lawrence must’ve accomplished . . . something, inside the palace.

  * * *

  * * *

  First Ker-noll Jash watched helplessly as his entire force halted in place and the battle ground to a halt. He’d already suspected his cause was doomed when the enemy reinforcements slammed into his unprotected left and the terrible ships on the water started their nightmare shelling. The enemy flying machines hadn’t even appeared yet, and his whole army was dying. But just as the enemy was trying to hold the palace, if he could just get in and hold it himself, Second General Ign might eventually drive the weakened enemy away, reinforcements or not. It was his only hope. And then the Great Attention Horn sounded, and everything fell apart.

  He’d heard attention horns before, of course, preceding most commands on the battlefield. And warriors usually stopped what they were doing to hear what came next, but that didn’t mean they should stop fighting if they were so closely engaged. Yet he’d never heard the Great Horn, from the Palace of Vanished Gods, in his life. He doubted any in his army had. But just like his troops, he instinctively, furiously, helplessly stopped and stared and waited—because this was a command from the Celestial Mother herself.

  Gradually, the ships on the water ceased firing and the killing around the palace eased as well. Finally, the terrible drone of the horn—like the roar of the Vanished Gods returned—faded away, and the only sounds came from the wind and wounded, the latter sweeping across Jash in a rising, suffused gust of misery. The individual shrieks and moans were indistinguishable, having commingled into a dreadful drone all their own. Jash had heard similar sounds before, at the front with Ign after a particularly heavy bombardment, but they were extinguished as the badly wounded were hastily dispatched and their bodies sent back to the cookpots. And he’d heard the same sounds, muted, from wounded left on the field after an unsuccessful attack. Those could go on for quite some time. He’d even heard worse, in a way, on the river when the galleys battled Santa Catalina and cries of pain turned to the high-pitched squeals of terror that always accompanied death in the water. But those sounds dwindled quickly as warriors were eaten or simply disappeared.

  Jash had always been able to separate himself somewhat from the desolate cries of those they left in front of the enemy on land. He couldn’t see the individuals making them, and it only intensified his anger that the enemy let them linger so long in pain—until he came to understand their adversaries didn’t eat the dead. They’d risk much to recover their own wounded, however, to heal them if they could, and that only made Jash vaguely angrier, though he remained unsure at what—or whom—and suspected that had contributed to his decline into cynicism.

  But this was the first time he’d ever been there, on a battlefield after the fighting stopped, to hear and see the anguish all around on such a scale. He’d probably lost half the troops he brought across the river, and the scope of the slaughter might be as great as that which occurred during the galley fights. Yet these wounded, these mangled dead, hadn’t sunk conveniently out of sight; he stood among them and knew he’d remember the dreadful sights, sounds, and nauseating smells until the day he too was slain.

  Another Great Horn sounded within the Palace of Vanished Gods, and Jash almost snorted with a kind of sick amusement. He’d heard this tone before, used for “officer’s call” in the New Army, but originally reserved for summoning the Hij of Old Sofesshk to hear decrees. The irony was, he suspected few such Hij remained, and none would venture onto a battlefield. The horn could have only one purpose.

  “The enemy reinforcements are pushing our troops aside, moving to support the knot of warriors still guarding the palace arch!” Ker-noll Shelg cried indignantly, as if their opponents were somehow cheating. In a way, they are, Jash admitted to himself, and they probably know it. But what can we do?

  “We must resume our attack at once!” snarled Sagat, and again Jash glared at him, wondering what authority Esshk had given him to make him presume to speak so freely around his betters.

  “No,” he snapped. “The ships will only open fire once more, and we’ll be slaughtered to no purpose.” He gestured at the entrance arch with his snout and his young crest drooped. “Upon reflection, I suspect we never had a chance of forcing our way inside. The enemy grasped the advantage of strength of arms and position from the start—with that brief exception—and used those advantages with daring and determinatio
n.”

  “You admire them!” Shelg accused.

  “I hate them,” Jash countered harshly, “but yes. I do admire them as well. I understand that in another time, in other conflicts, now is when we’d offer them the opportunity to join the Great Hunt,” he hissed derisively. “I’m quite sure, under the circumstances, they’d decline,” he added, watching as more and more enemy troops, led by a small but energetic specimen with black fur and cape and silver armor, rushed to fill the bewildered, widening gap between Jash’s army and the palace. Unlike the light-furred giant, Jash had never seen this leader before, but immediately recognized a confident commander of the fresh warriors it brought. “We certainly can’t break through now, not when the enemy may nearly equal our remaining numbers. We can only hope Second General Ign destroyed or stalled the main attack at the nakkle leg. He must somehow cross to aid us in recapturing the palace and the city.”

  His crest rose as he regarded Sagat once more. “In any event, the Celestial Mother has called the Hij.” He gestured around. “I see no Hij but us, such as we are. Sound the recall horns,” he told Shelg. “As soon as the Celestial Mother’s horn falls silent,” he added respectfully. “Bring the army back to the positions we occupied before the final attack. Try to rig as much overhead protection as you can,” he added doubtfully.

  “Then?” Shelg asked.

  Jash whipped his head to the side in a kind of mystified shrug. “Then, Ker-noll Shelg, those of us who are Hij—the senior officers who remain—will present ourselves as the Giver of Life commands, and hear what she has to say.”

  “This is treason!” Sagat seethed.