by Col Buchanan
It was enough to stop Coya in his tracks for a moment. He leaned on his cane to catch his breath, and gazed between defenders at the oncoming wave.
He would swear just then he could feel the stone flagging trembling beneath his boots. Closer they came, stumbling and hopping over a steaming carpet of corpses that stretched all the way to the earthen slope fronting the wall.
There must have been a thousand dead down there already. Coya thought that was a staggering number of casualties for a single morning’s work. And now rifle shots were raining down on the enemy figures too, dropping men in droves just as the reloaded cannon roared fury into their masses. Their ranks thinned even further.
Yet still they kept coming, throwing themselves into their near-certain deaths with a commitment he found wholly stunning. As though their lives were truly worth nothing at all.
This is madness, reeled his mind. This is insanity writ large.
He was still finding it hard to comprehend, why men would willingly sacrifice themselves in such a way as this. Not in the defence of their families or some other worthy cause, but purely for the matter of conquest.
It was the Empire’s greatest feat, right there before him, Coya realized. How they persuaded people to be nothing more than grist in the grind of imperial ambitions, bringing slaughter to themselves and other peoples.
Scowling, Coya started walking again along the parapet in his shambling, hurried gait. Behind him his bodyguard dallied for a moment, interested in some detail of the attack. He snapped over his shoulder for her attention. ‘Aren’t you meant to be protecting me or something?’
‘Sorry, my Lord Zeziké,’ she said, rejoining him with her long-legged stride. ‘Just trying to reckon their numbers.’
‘Call me lord one more time and I’ll be putting in for another replacement, you understand me?’
‘Of course.’
She was the best that they had on Khos, a League bodyguard for nearly five years now. Or so she had boasted to Coya, right about the time he was deciding he didn’t like her; didn’t like that she wasn’t Marsh.
‘Call me Coya for Kush sake or call me nothing at all.’
‘Delegate, I’ll call you anything you like, if only you’ll step into some shelter.’
‘Never mind that. I still need to find Creed here.’
But enemy shots were snapping in now, fired by snipers sheltering out there on the plain behind movable wicker walls. An enemy shell exploded nearby, sending debris from the earthen slope over the crenellations. The stonework shuddered minutely beneath his feet. And then without warning another shell hit the crenellations themselves and Coya flinched back, glimpsing pieces of stone and men flying from the blast. Screams rose out, and medicos ran stooped through the smoke towards them. People were lying dead out here. Coya’s stomach turned.
Lynx had borrowed a shield from somewhere in the last few moments, and she held it aloft casually to protect them both. Together they hurried towards the shelter of a nearby turret, from the top of which a ballista was hurling bundles of rocks through the air. As they scrambled up steps towards the turret’s doorway, Coya glanced down and saw that some enemy figures had somehow made it all the way to the base of the earthen slope, bearing ladders. One of the armoured soldiers carried a banner of Mann, holding it aloft proudly for those behind him to follow. Smoke barked from a hand cannon above and the figure fell in two, shorn through the waist. Others hurried to pick up the fallen flag.
‘It’s like some kind of simple-minded game to them,’ he gasped aloud to himself, stumbling through the open doorway into the turret’s sheltered interior. It was just as noisy inside, with riflemen firing away through slots in the curving turret wall. ‘Carry the flag to the top of the wall without stopping. Try not to get killed horribly in the process. Kill anyone you can.’
A game that had been inoculated into them so deeply that they mistook it for something real, even when chainshot was taking their heads off. He shook his own head in disbelief. ‘I can’t fathom it.’
‘The whip helps,’ remarked his bodyguard. ‘And crucifying deserters like they do, or soldiers who refuse to attack.’
Slaves then, no matter how you looked at it. Most of those enemy soldiers probably didn’t want to be doing this at all, for all that appearances portrayed otherwise.
Huffing and puffing, Coya carried on to the opposite doorway and looked out along the next expanse of parapet for a sign of Creed. But instead he witnessed the imperial tide crashing against the base of the wall.
Lynx was right behind him, the tall woman breathing down his neck.
‘My father was a soldier,’ she called out, as men scrambled desperately up the slope with shields over their heads. Some were carrying ladders but the Khosian defenders were picking them off first, experts by now at this kind of siege fighting. ‘A lot of it comes down to brotherhood as well. Mostly a soldier doesn’t want to let his friends down.’
Did that mean then that it was love propelling the enemy horde against the defences of the city? Love for their friends? That they were all bands of brothers down there getting mangled to pieces together – the best of emotions exploited by the very worst of desires?
‘Coya?’
He turned, startled to see a familiar sooty face amongst the riflemen. It was Captain Gamorre, leader of the Volunteer Rangers, who had escorted him into the Windrush forest to negotiate with the Contrarè; that damned fool waste of time in which he’d tried to enlist the natives’ aid in the war. The lean, stubble-headed woman frowned and rested the stock of her rifle on the floor, looking concerned. ‘You really think this is the best place for you right now, Coya? You want to get yourself killed?’
It was one of the curses of his famous heritage, not to mention his crippled condition – people kept treating him like a precious, fragile thing.
‘Captain, so good to see you well! Ah, and the rest of you!’
Heads were turning now from the firing slits in the wall, more rangers in their skins and leathers and camouflaged cloaks, and Coya could see other familiar faces amongst them too: the old grizzled sergeant, Sansun; the lad Xeno with the tattooed head; young Curl the medico, with her hair spiked in a tall crest, helping with the ammunition.
It really was heartening to see them alive and well. For a moment, he almost forgot the carnage on the wall.
‘How’s that head wound of yours?’ shouted Sergeant Sansun.
‘No better,’ Coya told him. ‘Tell me, where are your quarters in the city? You must let me treat you all to a meal when you can get away.’
‘We’re a little busy here, Coya,’ answered the captain grimly, hitching up her rifle again before turning her back to him. But Sergeant Sansun took the bait with a bitter snarl.
‘Quarters? They have us sleeping in kennels where they used to keep the goddamned dogs.’
‘You’re joking!’
‘I look like a man who’s joking?’
‘Well that won’t do at all. I have a place in the south you can come and stay. Plenty of room there, if a little draughty. I’ll clear it with your people if you need me to.’
And Coya told the old veteran where he was talking about, the inkworks down in All Fools.
‘Anything would be better than where we’re staying now,’ said the girl Curl.
‘Well the offer’s there if you want it,’ Coya said. ‘Right now, I don’t suppose any of you can point me towards General Creed?’
But none of them had seen the Lord Protector. Coya said his farewells then stepped out through the doorway, bracing himself as if he was stepping out into hail. Lynx stepped quickly to flank him.
Outside on the open parapet, the tops of a few ladders were appearing now along the wall. Defenders shoved them aside with their pikes, firing down at whoever was below or swinging at those trying to scramble up over the edge. They looked like they were beating back a fire, grimly calm and dirty-faced, though those weren’t flames they were stamping on but human faces, human hand
s.
Suddenly a cluster of grenades went off, sending figures reeling this way and that. Lynx ducked in front of Coya with the shield held out and caught a few metallic raps against it. When she lowered the shield, they could see a small group of enemy fighters launching themselves over the crenellations at the defenders, hacking wildly with swords and axes.
A few were running right at them.
Coya stared dumbstruck, having never seen the enemy this close before. He saw one sweating, armoured fellow bouncing in on the balls of his feet just like Marsh used to do, two curved swords in his grasp, moving with all the speed and grace of an expert fighter – but Lynx threw the shield at his face and he went down hard. She fired a shot through the throat of a second attacker, and he pitched over the edge. She took a third with a wicked-looking blade in her other hand, knocking aside his weapon before stabbing him deep in the belly.
The young man shuddered, gaping at him over the woman’s shoulder as though it was Coya’s fault his life was being taken.
Coya looked away, squeezing his eyes shut for a moment.
‘Is that him?’
‘Who?’
‘The Lord Protector,’ said his bodyguard, kicking the folding soldier to the flagstones. Coya saw her point east along the street that ran by the back of the wall. ‘Riding at the head of that cavalry column there.’
Damn it all, she was right. That fool Creed was already setting off on his sortie, leading a cavalry formation towards the eastern gateway in his great bearskin coat.
There was no way to reach him in time. No way to talk some sense into the man, to repeat more forcefully what his advisers had already stated that morning – that Creed was taking an insane and unnecessary risk by leading a surprise attack like this.
‘What a way to end the year,’ Coya grumbled to himself, not liking this at all.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Bahn
‘Wet work, eh, Calvone!’
The rider by Bahn’s side hollered through sweat raining from beneath his helm: a steaming Red Guard hunched in full armour, his crimson cloak flowing behind him like a trailing flame; a man on fire. Stooping in his saddle, the fellow chopped at the next passing figure with his curved sword – a human blur flashing between him and Bahn before it was gone, trampled beneath the hooves of the zels following behind.
The Red Guard whooped from the thrill of the kill.
‘Let’s clip their wings, men!’ shouted a rider directly in front, and it was General Creed himself with his raven-black hair dashing back over his shoulders, the low sun shattering into brilliance behind the blade he aimed straight and true at the enemy encampment.
Bahn shook his head like a man startled awake. The wind washed over the scarf tied across his face, stabbing at watering eyes narrowed below the rim of his helm. He was hot and sticky with the action of the moment, his whole body jerking up and down to the stride of the galloping, reeking zel beneath him. One hand gripped the reins and a bundle of hairy mane. His other hand held his sword like a thing forgotten, rap-rapping against his leg.
What am I doing here? he asked himself with more than a modicum of fear, for Bahn could truly remember nothing from the most recent moments behind him – no notion at all of how he was outside the city’s northern wall on the lathered back of a zel, galloping across the plain towards the imperial encampment, following after General Creed in his great bearskin coat.
Bahn wiped his eyes clear of sweat as the zels surged over the trampled turf, enemy figures scrambling out of their way.
Mandalay was the name of the rider flanking Bahn, he recalled now. Colonel Mandalay of the lancers, veteran of the battle at Chey-Wes. Sure enough, behind them charged three hundred cavalrymen in the thinnest of wedges, leaning into the strides of their mounts with their curved blades catching the light, whooping and lashing out at whoever swept by. They seemed keen to be out here taking the fight to the enemy. Keen to be following General Creed at the very tip of the wedge into the enemy encampment itself, bounding over half-finished earthworks and muddy figures scrambling for cover, ignoring the growing crackle of rifle fire coming their way.
Recollections were starting to shake loose in Bahn’s skull as the ground flashed past beneath his boots. Memories from the last handful of days were coming back to him, vague and detached as though they belonged to someone else entirely; too awful to recount in fact, too sickening to believe. Yet Bahn had no choice but to assume them as his own, as unpleasant a thing as climbing into the sodden clothing of a corpse.
In his own way he had talked General Creed into leading this brief sortie through the enemy positions. Supposedly it was to gauge the chances for success of a larger attack against the enemy, while giving them a bloodied nose at the same time – though what Creed was gauging now seemed more fundamental than that, more like whose side the gods of old were really on.
Right through the imperial encampment he was leading them, whipping past tents as they charged down one of the lanes between the efficiently arranged blocks of quarters, startled enemy soldiers yelling all around them. Bullets zipped through the breezy air. The riders were moving too fast to be hit but a zel cried out from somewhere behind, sounding like it was falling. Off to their left some outriders were trying to intercept their path, but a sea of tents was getting in their way. To the right rose the distant wall and sanctuary of the city, much further away than Bahn had been expecting.
Something whipped over his zel’s snorting head and he knew a spear had just narrowly missed them both.
Bahn leaned further down over the zel’s neck for cover. The heartbeats in his ears were as loud as the thundering hoof-beats of their mounts. His tongue was a dry stick in his mouth. Steel sang as Mandalay hacked at another passing enemy soldier. Behind them a Red Guard cried out as he crashed from his mount, and there was another cry from a wounded zel.
One strike and he could go down here too, right in the midst of fifty thousand Mannian fighters, a people who rejoiced in tormenting their prisoners. He’d be lucky if he bit into the suicide wafer hanging from his neck in time, the same wafer they had all been given in case of capture. Still, Bahn Calvone felt more alive than he had done in days, weeks even.
Perhaps it was the intensity of the action, the cleansing breath of fear coursing through his blood, that pulled him clear of his fugue condition into this sudden spell of clarity. Whatever the reason, Bahn felt himself once again, and he would have rejoiced in the fact had he not sensed the transitory nature of the moment.
How chilling, in fact, to have these sudden precious moments of lucid thinking, only to know that once his blood cooled he would undoubtedly sink back into that shameful weak-minded condition that had possessed him so entirely since his return to the besieged city, his head fogged as though it was drugged, his compulsions those of a stranger, an enemy.
Bahn remembered what he was supposed to do on behalf of the Mannian Empire, and all of a sudden he experienced a desperate need to vomit.
I am a traitor to my own people. My own loved ones!
He thought again of the suicide wafer round his neck. He would have reached for it if an enemy rider hadn’t flashed towards him, swinging a sword as he came in alongside him.
Bahn ducked beneath the swinging blade. By instinct he jabbed across his zel’s head with his own blade, missing too, remembering all at once how difficult it was to fight on the bouncing back of a zel.
More enemy riders were coursing against their left flank. Ahead of him General Creed struck one from the saddle, the figure falling under the zel of Bahn’s opponent and almost unseating him. Bahn swung and missed again. Once more the enemy blade came swinging in and Bahn could only duck beneath it, the steel ringing across his helm with shocking force. Bright stars flashed in his sight. With time slowing to a crawl Bahn felt his grip loosening, his body falling before he could right himself.
Free fall. The awful shock of crashing to the ground in his armour, his arms instinctively wrapping his head whil
e zels pounded over him like the tumbling rocks of a landslide.
Through his arms Bahn saw the Khosian formation of riders charging onwards between the tents, several of the zels riderless like his own, leaving him behind to his fate. He knew he should grab for the wafer hanging from his neck. Shouts filled the air. Enemy figures loomed and a boot kicked out at him, then another. Hands grabbed hold of Bahn and dragged him to his unsteady feet.
He was surrounded by imperial soldiers, wild of eye, jabbering and grabbing for a piece of him.
Let it end this way, he thought with a sudden rush of relief. Let the enemy cause their own downfall with his bloody death here on the plain, depriving themselves of his betrayal.
But no, here came an imperial officer barging his way into the fray, shouting for the men not to harm Bahn but to take him prisoner instead. Now, at last, Bahn snatched at the suicide wafer dangling from his neck. But they yanked it from his hand and restrained his arms behind his back, so that he stood there panting into the face of the officer. The man was red-faced with barely controlled anger. Bahn spat in his eyes, then roared and struggled to be free from them.
‘Come on then, you bastards, finish it!’
In the distance he could hear the Khosian guns firing, cutting though the imperial forces that had been attacking the wall since dawn.
It took him a moment to realize it was more than merely his legs shaking beneath him, that the ground itself was beginning to tremble. Over the din of the siege guns Bahn could make out a rumble of hoof-beats growing louder, coming ever closer. He looked around as they all did.
