by Stephen Hunt
‘No, sir,’ said the legionary. ‘The raiding force is still silent. Their only calls are from the city’s Guild of Radiomen hold, the rebels requesting help and reinforcements from other towns.’
‘Keep trying to reach Paetro,’ ordered Duncan and the hatch clanged shut. As silent as death.
It grew harder to see the city through rolling waves of smoke snaking out from straw-packed shot; then, as one, the column pivoted, heading directly for Midsburg’s eastern corner. They only had the trench works, embankments and traverses between them and the curtain wall, dirt-packed slopes and soil-filled bags proving as insubstantial as mist to the Twelfth Armoured. A roaring chopping noise passed overhead as a squadron of helos arrowed over the war machines, adding their weapon pods to the fusillade of artillery from the ground vehicles, rockets arcing out and disappearing into the murk as showers of stone and brick fountained out of the fog of war. A line of grey-uniformed northern soldiers emerged from of one of the trenches, rifles abandoned and hands high in the air. Nocks saw the rebels first and swivelled one of the mounted guns around, the heavy steel weapon recoiling as he fired burst after burst of shells into the line. Men crumpled like rice paper caught in a threshing machine, the remains of those that turned and ran showering into the trench they had unwisely abandoned.
‘They were surrendering!’ protested Duncan.
‘Can’t have them making trouble behind us,’ growled Nocks. ‘And we don’t have time to stop. Not if you want your imperial girl back alive.’
‘Where’s your honour?’
‘Honour? You want honour, boy, read a book to find it. Old soldiers’ tales grow as cloudy as wine over time. Out here there’s only coming back alive with the job done, or leaving your corpse in the field for crows and looters to pick over. Nocks, he’s only ever favoured the first option.’
Duncan heard a noise behind him and turned just in time to see three grey-uniformed rebels climbing up over side of the moving tank. Nocks swung the mounted gun’s muzzle down, but it couldn’t depress to a low enough angle to shoot them off and then the rebels were swarming aboard the Wolf. Shouts and shots sounded from the other side of the tank. They were being boarded on all sides. The surrendering soldiers were a diversion! Duncan fumbled for the heavy pistol in his belt, its cold steel grip slippery in his palm, raising it like dragging lead into the air. Almost instantly, Nocks was wrestling with a bayonet-tipped rifle in the hands of a giant of a rebel. One of the grey-coated rebels had his rifle off his back and fired it wildly, the bullet whining past Duncan’s cheek. There was an angry roar of electric rifles from the legionaries, the chatter of weapons fire echoing across the tank among the screams of dying men. Duncan triggered the pistol and blinked in the bright explosion of flames from its barrel vents, hardly any recoil as the rocket-propelled shell found its mark almost instantly, spinning the rifleman around so violently he collided with another rebel and they both collapsed to the steel floor behind the ramparts. Nocks twisted the contested bayonet down into the fallen soldier’s chest, leaving it impaled and the victim yelling in agony. With his rifle trapped, the big rebel stepped back and reached for his pistol holster, but Nocks was on top of him, head-butting the rebel’s face, using the second of confused pain to draw his dagger and shove it through the grey coat and into the enemy soldier’s heart.
A fourth rebel had climbed onto the war machine unseen, raising a cavalryman’s carbine up behind Nocks. Duncan yelled and brought his rocket pistol around, the artillery sergeant flinging himself down and to the side as he saw Duncan’s gun swinging towards him. The pistol roared and the rebel was punched back five feet, the part of his chest that wasn’t caved in, aflame. As suddenly as the hand-to-hand fighting had started, it was over. Only Duncan’s rapid breathing and the rattle of fire from the battlefield beyond.
Nocks picked himself up and bad-temperedly booted the dead soldier. ‘I’m obliged, boy.’
‘They didn’t have to die.’
‘Better them than me. That’s my regimental motto.’ Nocks laughed, an ugly sound, but one in keeping with this place.
Duncan hardly had time to take in the dead bodies, ignoring their accusing, wide eyes; these ones, his. Not dead from the distant artillery, the guns of the south or the Vandian war machine. Dead by my hand. There was a shudder as the Wolf crashed straight through a mound of soil, screams of crushed and buried men, and Duncan’s hand seized the turret’s hatch handle to stop from spilling over. He righted himself and peered through a firing slit in the rampart. Duncan watched royalist cavalrymen peel off beside the war machines as the column gained the piecemeal network of ditches and embrasures outside the city, more than four hundred mounted soldiers sweeping like thunder across the defensive line.
Riflemen inside the trenches appeared on fire-steps and opened up on mounts and men, a volley like splintering wood cutting down some of the lead riders, but Duncan could see that the rebels’ numbers had been depleted by the artillery bombardment, the majority withdrawn behind the relative safety of the curtain wall. And we’re about to spoil that illusion of safety for them. Leaping horses cleared the first ditches, sabres sweeping down as others fired into the ditches with pistols and carbines. My brother-in-law may be a dolt, but he’s an eager one and no coward, thought Duncan. He doubted any tales Wallingbeck carried back from this savage day would impress the nobleman’s troublesome wife, however.
‘This is your first time, ain’t it?’ said Nocks.
‘I’ve seen dead people,’ said Duncan. We had to fight for claims in the sky mines with nothing more than pickaxe handles. ‘I was in the slave revolt.’
‘How’d that go for you?’
‘I was shot in the heart by Jacob Carnehan. He left me for dead.’
Nocks seemed to find this greatly amusing. ‘That was mighty inconsiderate of him.’
‘What’s so funny?’
‘Nothing much. Just occurs to me that there’s a man who mightily needs killing.’
Yes, but who’s to do it? Perhaps ten tanks jounced in front of the Wolf, and with a throaty battle roar from their engines they mounted the final soil embankment, only slowing a fraction on the slope, before each machine struck the heavily damaged curtain wall with the impact of a four-hundred-ton sledgehammer. The first three colossal fighting machines pushed through with a landslide of brick and stone collapsing around them, the others mounting the smoking rubble and dipping down as their turrets opened up on Midsburg’s exposed interior, before rumbling forward and inside. The Wolf followed and as it bucked over the mound where the curtain wall had stood, Duncan saw that the first vehicles through the breach had slowed enough for their legionaries to dismount from the ramparts and fan out.
It was complete chaos inside. Shooting. Rebels running. Burning buildings. The infantry spread out, moving to protect their steel charges from Weyland grenadiers running to toss fused charges against the drive sprockets, a spirited defence by regiments held in reserve behind a wall that no longer even existed in this section of the city. The Wolf came down slow over mounds of stone, as broken cannon platforms and half-buried corpses churned below its tracks. Duncan’s legionaries dropped down the steps and hurled themselves into the smoke. They moved in disciplined units of four called quads, each legionary covering their comrades, and where anything moved, twitched or fired back, their electric rifles poured bullets into the smoke; walls and entire houses collapsing as bursts tore through them. With the legionaries disembarked, the huge war machines shuddered forward again, ploughing through the cheap houses in the lee of the curtain wall, every gun trained back along the ramparts, clearing the wall of riflemen and cannon platforms. Anyone kneeling behind the unprotected parapet and on the wall-walk side of the defences shuddered and fell, cut down in the open beneath a storm of bullets. Shots fell against the Wolf’s armour, clanging where they struck, and Duncan added to the melee, aiming over the parapet and firing his pistol into the soldiers along the curtain wall. One of the Vandian war machine’s armo
ured skirts was circled by protruding pipes connected to spherical steel barrels and Duncan saw their purpose when a vast hoop of flames jetted out in all directions, buildings bursting apart in balls of fire. It took the lead of the armoured column, tracking down the wall and incinerating a passage for the other war machines to follow. The opening in Midsburg’s defences hadn’t gone unnoticed on the hill. Duncan could hear a distant roar as thousands of royalist soldiers came charging across the battlefield, heading for the breach along the wall.
‘Down we go!’ yelled Nocks. ‘Our business ain’t on the city wall.’
‘We should stay with the Wolf!’
‘Your Vandian friends’ strategy is sound enough,’ said Nocks. ‘Leave defenders along the outer wall and you’ll be fighting your way through the city with rifles aimed at your back as well as ones aimed at your front. The rebels will surrender quickly enough in the streets once they see the king’s standard fluttering from every tower along the battlements.’
They dismounted and ran through the streets towards the heart of the city. The artillery shells falling on the city had lessened now the royalists knew friendly troops had gained Midsburg. Thank you, Father. There had been enough carnage earlier, however, to make up for it; smoke from fires burning out of control, the shadows of townspeople moving through the fumes as they tried to escape with whatever money and possessions were most portable. It was like being back in Northhaven when the slave raider had struck the town from the air. It’s a lot easier when it’s not your neighbours and friends doing the dying, though. Occasionally they caught sight of rebel soldiers running panicked through the ruins, but it was as if the soldiers were on a stage, part of a play and separate from Duncan’s existence. Once, a young soldier came sprinting out of a side-street and went hurtling past them, not even looking at or seeing Duncan, although he surely felt the shots in his back when Nocks gunned him down.
Duncan looked in disgust at the cowardly manservant but Nocks just laughed. ‘One less, boy. One less.’
Duncan coughed as he blundered through the smoke, using the cannon fire against the curtain wall as a compass, the distant thuds of breaking masonry sounding like a drum. ‘I can hardly see a thing.’
‘Must be why it’s called the fog of war, boy.’
Nocks strode up to the soldier’s corpse, knelt alongside and started patting down the bleeding uniform and pulling out coins and keepsakes.
No. Anger swelled inside Duncan. That young soldier hadn’t asked for any of this. Probably been pulled from a farm by some northern landowner, had a rifle shoved in his hands, then pushed into Midsburg to defend it. And now what little he’d once owned was being stripped from him. ‘Leave the money!’
‘For what? The worms, or the next soldier who stumbles across the body?’
Duncan flourished the heavy pistol. ‘I mean it.’
‘Your clip is empty. You emptied it on the war wagon.’
‘I wouldn’t bet your life on it, Nocks.’
He snorted. ‘There’s an ammunition indicator on the side of the gun, you idiot. It’s red!’
Duncan turned the pistol. A drum-like indicator he had thought was ornamental had rotated around to reveal a red line across the steel.
‘Don’t bother reloading,’ said Nocks. The servant raised his pistol, pointing it directly as Duncan’s head. At this range, he’d need to be blind to miss. ‘This is just perfect.’
Duncan stared at the servant as though he had gone insane. ‘What for? Because I won’t let you loot?’
‘Let’s just say if old Nocks has to risk his neck in a city’s sack, he’ll rescue willowy Willow first,’ said Nocks, spitting to the side while keeping the pistol barrel poked towards Duncan’s face. ‘Your sister owes me a sniff of her sweet flower, and as much as I’d like to take the same liberties with your imperial girl, I don’t reckon the emperor would be too happy if I did. Never does to have an emperor pissed at you.’
‘I’m your ally! Your duty – I saved your life back on the Wolf!’
‘And I’m sure I said I’m obliged, so I’ll make this quick for you. You’re the best kind of ally of all, boy … the dead kind who can’t betray me.’ Nocks gestured with his pistol. ‘Ease that imperial hand cannon into your left hand and toss it over there. Drop your belt with the spare clips, too.’
Duncan switched the gun, held the pistol out and lobbed it to the ground, then unbuckled his ammunition belt and let it fall to the ground. I underestimated you, Willow. I thought I’d finally put you in a position where you had to help me. But this was your plan all along. You’ve murdered me at last.
‘So Carnehan senior already shot you in the heart,’ smirked Nocks, ‘and I can see how well that worked out for him, so I’m going to put one right between your eyes to make sure. A nice little hole for the maggots to crawl through.’ His finger tightened around the trigger. ‘Just as easy and painless as—’
There was a crack of a distant pistol and Nocks went spinning, his shot going wild and hitting Duncan in the centre of his chest armour with a violent crack, splinters from the round scarring his face. Duncan yelled as he was thrown back through the air, a sledgehammer driven into his gut, his face torn against hot, burning rubble as he hit the ground. Duncan’s vision streaked red with blood coming down into his eyes. He pulled himself around, desperately searching for Nocks, but Willow’s perfidious manservant had fallen into the ruins of a smoking building and vanished. Duncan touched the breastplate with two fingers, buckled in the centre where an odd green gel leaked from beneath the rent material. A figure came limping out of the smoke of war, a civilian whose face lay hidden under a foreign merchanteer’s cloak, a Weyland revolver clutched in his hand. No, not a civilian. Paetro!
Duncan recoiled in shock as the hoary old soldier drew closer. Paetro’s face had been rendered into a bleeding mess of cuts with his green silk shirt soaked in blood from similar chest wounds. ‘Sweet saints!’
‘You should see the man who worked this evil on me,’ coughed Paetro. He lifted up the Weyland revolver in disgust and tucked it under his belt. ‘Luckiest shot I ever made with an antique. I thought the hounds in blue uniform were on our side, lad.’
‘Willow betrayed me,’ said Duncan. ‘This ambush was her doing.’
‘I warned you about trusting her back on the ship. It’s your sister’s day for treachery, all right. She’s played me false again too,’ said Paetro. ‘Willow cleared off with the outlaw priest, Carnehan. Left us hanging in the wind.’
The pastor’s here? A sudden vision of Lady Cassandra tied to Jacob Carnehan’s saddle spun through Duncan’s mind, explosions flowering around the killer as he galloped through the siege. The scar on his chest burned in shame at the memory of how easily Carnehan had emptied a round into his heart. Despite himself, Duncan felt a superstitious shiver of fear. ‘Taking Cassandra with them?’
Paetro shook his head. ‘It was a ruse all along, lad. The little highness was never here. Carnehan packed her off to Rodal long before the siege started. I came out to where the Twelfth Armoured said they’d dropped you after I got through to a Sig on your column. Didn’t want you risking your neck for a fraud.’
Rodal! Cassandra, how are we ever going to find you in the caves and canyons of that gale-tossed place? Duncan retrieved his rocket pistol and carefully inspected the ruins where Nocks had disappeared. There was a smear of blood there where the manservant had fallen before dragging himself away. Wounded; but I’m not nearly lucky enough for it to have killed him. Duncan thought of Cassandra and a mixture of relief and regret flooded in as he realized his mission in Midsburg had never stood a chance from the start. ‘This was all for nothing, then.’
‘I wouldn’t be saying that,’ grunted Paetro, leaning against the stump of a lamppost. ‘The emperor’s given out a few lumps to the slave revolt; pride and honour are restored, for whatever that’s worth. There’ll be a grand triumph laid on in Vandis when we return.’
Not for us. For Prince Gyal and his b
eautiful wife to be; curse the arrogant nobleman. ‘We’ll see what the princess’s alliance with Gyal is worth, now. Helrena won’t go back to Vandia, not without Cassandra.’
‘I know. And neither will you or I. Not till this is done.’
The haggard wounded bear of a soldier didn’t say they still had business with the pastor and Willow. He didn’t need to. Duncan holstered his pistol. ‘You look like you need to go home … you look like hell, Paetro Barca.’
‘Only fitting after encountering a few demons, lad.’
Duncan’s chest scar burned like ice. Northhaven’s pastor, Duncan’s treacherous sister and her murderous manservant ahead of him; Prince Gyal taking up the rear. And how many more of them are still on the loose?
It felt like home to Jacob, riding with the Royal Sharps Greys. Just men with rifles and bad intentions. It’s amazing how far you can go in such company. Vandian helos skimmed through the smoke of Midsburg’s burning skyline, dipping down to land raiders to harry the men on the battlements from the city side. That was the kind of mobility it was hard to oppose with squadrons of horses and rampart-mounted cannons, but luckily for the invaders, it didn’t look like the assembly’s army was really trying. Now I know how those Nijumeti nomads up north must feel when they charge the Rodalian Skyguard with horses and spears. Timber and stone fountained into the air as the wall’s batteries fell silent one by one, the counter-fire needed to give the gunners on the south’s cannons something to occupy their minds seeping away. Bullets whizzed past Jacob’s head, angry wasps seeking bodies to burst, but never the pastor’s. It was only the good people who died. That was the lesson of war. The good. The kind. The meek. They were always first to be swallowed by the ravening maw of battle. Men like Jake Silver; they got spat out, too tough to digest.
‘You’re fine with what needs doing?’ Jacob asked Arick Densen.
‘I know I don’t much fancy the idea of charging those steel fortresses on tracks,’ said the cavalry sergeant. ‘Even if Hard Charging Houldridge can scrape together enough horse regiments for a second attempt. That doesn’t strike me as much of a winning strategy.’
