The Infernal Battalion

by Django Wexler

  She didn’t put up too much resistance as Raesinia walked her around the side of one of the hospital tents, her crying friend following behind. Away from the frantic movement at the entrance, flies covered the pools of blood and discarded limbs with a thick, living carpet. They rose in a buzzing, complaining cloud as Raesinia approached; then they settled again. Somewhere, crows were cawing.

  Abraham sat on a stone at the rear of the tent, eyes closed, head lowered. Raesinia told the two girls to wait and knelt in front of him. She had to poke him before he responded with a low moan.

  “Too many.” His voice was breathy. “There’s too many.”

  “I know.”

  Raesinia felt her heart twist. She didn’t know Abraham well, but his compassion was obvious. Even a single person in pain made him want to help, let alone this nightmare. And while his gift was extraordinary, it wasn’t without limits.

  “Can you handle one more?” Raesinia said. “It’s a small wound, but deep. A little girl.”

  “One more.” Abraham opened his eyes. They were bloodshot, as though he’d been on a three-​day bender. “I can... handle one more.”

  Raesinia beckoned the injured girl over. She hesitated at the sight of Abraham, but he mustered a smile, and she took a few stumbling steps closer. Raesinia caught her elbow and guided her forward, and Abraham put his hand against the skin of her stomach.

  The wound, crusted with dried blood, closed as though it were being pulled together from underneath. The twine worked its way out, falling away. The girl gave a soft sigh, her eyes rolling up in her head, and Raesinia had to catch her under the arms before she fell. Her breathing was steady, and color was already returning to her cheeks.

  “What happened?” Her friend hurried over, eyes wet with tears. “What did you do to her?”

  “She’s going to be okay,” Raesinia said. “Find somewhere she can rest, and stay with her.”

  “I need to get permission.” The girl was trembling. “From the lieutenant.”

  “You have my permission.” Raesinia looked the girl in the eye and saw the moment recognition dawned.

  “I—​I didn’t...” she stammered.

  “It’s fine.” Raesinia transferred the unconscious girl to her friend. “Can you take her?”

  The girl nodded. “Th-thank you. Your Highness.”

  Raesinia smiled, trying to ignore the screams and the boom of the guns. The two girls moved off, one carrying the other, and she looked back at Abraham. His eyes were still open, but he didn’t seem to be looking at anything in particular. Raesinia frowned nervously.

  “Abraham? Are you...? Is this hurting you?”

  “Hurting?” He blinked, focusing, and shook his head. “Just... tired. So tired.”

  “You should rest. At least for a few minutes.” She felt suddenly guilty for bringing the girl over.

  He snorted, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his palms. “A few minutes won’t make any difference. A week wouldn’t be enough.” He looked up at her. “I will do what I can. It’s just... worse than I ever imagined.”

  “I know,” Raesinia said. “I’m sorry.”

  “You did not force me to come here,” Abraham said. His hands tightened into fists. “Sometimes I wish I could fight like Alex. I could have gone with her and Winter.”

  “Sothe is with them,” Raesinia said. “She’ll keep everyone safe.”

  “I believe it,” Abraham said solemnly. Then, abruptly, he held up a hand.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “The guns have stopped.”

  It was true. There were still screams from the cutter’s tent, and the more distant sounds of fighting on the other fronts, but the endless thunder of the cannonade had gone quiet. After a few moments, cannon picked up again, closer and louder. Those were Archer’s guns, Raesinia knew. Marcus had ordered the gunners not to waste ammunition trying to knock out Janus’ batteries, so if they were firing—

  “They’re coming,” she said. “I have to go. Are you all right here for the moment?”

  Abraham nodded, eyelids already drooping. Raesinia ran back around the cutter’s tent and up the hill, following the tracks they’d cut this morning, now a churned mess of stones and mud. She detoured around the boulder and the command post and headed for another vantage she’d discovered, a stump at the top of the trench line, high enough above Archer’s guns that she could see past the smoke.

  Sure enough, down on the plain, tight-​packed columns of infantry were moving in for the assault. Smaller guns accompanied them, their sharper reports like the yapping of excited dogs. Archer’s batteries returned fire, solid shot arcing over the heads of the Second Division soldiers in the trenches to descend screaming on the plain, bouncing in wild, devastating arcs. The advancing troops were Murnskai, their white uniforms a vivid contrast with the dark earth. Whenever a ball struck, it mowed through the column, carrying away several men and leaving more broken bodies lying on a stretch of ground that was already littered with corpses.

  As Marcus had said this morning, Janus was well aware that his attackers were never going to be able to win a firefight with defenders hunkered down behind breastworks. This time, four battalion columns came in at the double, breaking into a charge as soon as the first shots rang out from the trenches. They made no attempt to form into a line and maximize their firepower, but remained concentrated, relying on the momentum of thousands of bodies to carry them forward. The heads of the columns started to shrink, men falling faster and faster as they got closer to the trenches, but they kept coming. The neat formations, with one company behind the next, started to dissolve, producing a dense mass of men with bayonets fixed, huddling together against the deadly lead rain.

  The Girls’ Own, who held the first trench, didn’t wait to receive them. They fired a last volley and ran, scrambling up onto the unprotected hillside. Volunteers farther up the hill continued to shoot, but the Murnskai could see their enemy fleeing and came on all the faster. Some of them stopped to fire, and blue-​uniformed women tumbled and went down across the hill. The fastest crested the breastwork and jumped down into the trench their enemies had vacated.

  Somewhere down below, Cyte gave the order with her customary good timing. Raesinia couldn’t hear it, but she saw the effect. The Third Regiment, de Koste’s troops, leapt up from their trenches farther up the hill and counter-​charged, firing as they went. The Murnskai soldiers fired back, but soon discovered that the trenches, steep ​walled on the downhill side, were a gradual slope facing the other way and gave no protection at all from incoming fire. The men in white were no more eager to receive a bayonet charge than the women in blue had been, and they broke before contact, only a few stragglers being cut down with cold steel. De Koste’s men continued to fire into the fleeing Murnskai, and Archer’s guns thundered again, harassing them as they went.

  Cyte had suggested the tactic, and they’d been using it all day, with the soldiers digging frantically to repair and extend their trenches even as the cannonballs fell like rain. Raesinia had watched it work three times now, smashing everything Janus had sent against them. But he seemed to have an endless supply of fresh troops to renew the struggle, while every time more of the defenders were hauled away to the horror of the cutter’s station or the growing lines of corpses.

  As though the thought had summoned them, Raesinia saw more enemy soldiers coming, a long line of them, pushing over the blue- and white-​coated bodies that littered the plain. This new group was a motley bunch, with some representatives from both armies, but many in civilian clothes. Raesinia frowned at them. Does Janus have his own volunteers? Then, Winter’s story running through her mind, she suddenly understood.

  Red-​eyes.

  Raesinia jumped off the stump and started down the hill before she was quite aware of what she was doing. I have to warn Cyte. The bodies of the Beast were not like ordinary men and women—​they knew no pain and showed no fear. They would never break, never run, only keep coming unti
l they were dead. And if they get too close, they can take our soldiers for their own.

  The regiments had been exchanging duties with each attack. The retreating Girls’ Own had halted, now occupying the highest point on the hillside, just below the artillery. Someone recognized Raesinia despite her filthy state, and a cheer went up as she went by. It was passed on to the volunteers, in the center, men and women from the streets of Vordan without even uniform jackets to call their own. They’d started the day armed mostly with swords, spears, and a few shotguns and hunting pieces. Now most of them had muskets, looted from friendly and enemy dead. They shouted and hurrahed as Raesinia ran, her legs feeling wobbly underneath her. Would they still be cheering if their queen took a tumble and rolled down the hill?

  Fortunately, she managed to avoid that embarrassment, and arrived at the leading trenches, where the Second Regiment was lining the breastworks. Raesinia looked for the flag and ran toward it, dodging around bits of broken log, stones, and corpses. A woman, shot in the act of trying to run, lay half in and half out of the trench. Murnskai soldiers, huddled around wounds that turned their white uniforms pink. A teenage girl and a heavily bearded Murnskai lying in a heap, each with a hand still gripping the blade that had killed the other.

  There was no sign of Cyte, but she found de Koste with one of his captains, calmly surveying the advance of this fresh batch of opponents. Archer’s guns had shifted their fire from the fleeing Murnskai to the new threat, and the cannonballs were falling on the red-​eyes. They kept no formation, which made the guns less effective.

  De Koste’s eyes went wide at the sight of Raesinia, but he calmed his features at once and made a deep bow, which was echoed by all the men around him.

  “Your Highness,” he said, “I, ah, didn’t expect to see you here. You’re not injured, I trust?”

  “I was assisting at the cutter’s station.” Raesinia shook her head frantically. “The new attack—”

  “Rabble,” the captain said. “Half of them don’t even have muskets. If this is all Janus has left, we can hold here until the Beast comes again.”

  It took Raesinia a moment to realize he was being figurative. “They’re not just rabble; they’re fanatics. Maniacs. They’re not going to stop. You have to be ready.”

  “We’ll stop them,” de Koste said. “But please, Your Highness. For your own safety...”

  Raesinia turned away, back to the oncoming red-​eyes. They were still coming, thousands of them. Those in the lead spread out and came on a dead sprint.

  “They’re certainly bearing the cannon-​fire well,” de Koste muttered.

  “We’ll see how they like musketry,” the captain said, voice full of confidence. “Fire at will!”

  Sergeants passed the command up and down the trench. Moments later, muskets started to crack, the shots coming singly at first and then running together into a rolling, rattling crush of sound. Smoke billowed up around the trench, intermittently obscuring the view, but Raesinia could see red-​eyes falling by the dozen, spinning or pitching forward as the musket balls struck them, while their comrades pressed on over their corpses.

  They’re not going to break. Marcus had told her once that a bayonet charge basically came down to a contest of nerves. If the defenders really believed the attackers would press the charge home, through the storm of shot, then they wouldn’t stand to receive it. But if it was the attackers who lost their courage first, the charge would founder and break in blood. But the red-​eyes don’t have any nerve to lose.

  “You’re going to have to fight them hand-to-hand,” she told de Koste urgently. “Warn your men—”

  Too late, and in any event she wasn’t sure he heard over the racket. The red-​eyes took a last volley of fire at a range of only a dozen yards, and it inflicted horrific damage. A whole line of them went down, corpses falling among the dead soldiers already piling up at the base of the slope. But the charge rolled on, unstoppable, men and women leaping over the bodies and scrambling past the earth-and-log barrier. In a few moments, they were into the trench, and the world went mad.

  Men were fighting everywhere, soldiers in blue against erstwhile comrades, or Murnskai in mud-​stained white; or men, women, and children in civilian clothes. A Third Regiment soldier opened the throat of a Murnskai with his bayonet, nimbly sidestepping the dying man’s riposte. The next red-​eye was a young woman, ragged ​haired and dressed in rags, and he hesitated long enough for her to gut him with a skinning knife. Three children, in long formal dresses already torn and stained with blood, worked together to overwhelm another soldier, two grabbing his legs while the third pulled him to the floor of the trench and pressed her face close to his. A moment later he rose, a red glow in his eyes, and rammed his bayonet into the back of the man fighting beside him.

  Raesinia saw the captain go down, shot at close range by a thick-​bearded fisherman who held a pistol in his left hand, his right having been carried away by a cannon-​shot. The stump drooled blood, but it didn’t seem to impair him. De Koste drew his sword as an old woman, gray hair wild and filthy, scrambled over the trench wall. He ran her neatly through the stomach, then gaped as her clawlike hands grabbed the hilt of his sword and pulled him close. A young boy in the remnants of a smart page’s uniform leapt from the breastwork and landed on de Koste’s back, stabbing over and over with a long dirk.

  The ferocity of the assault was too much. Some soldiers fought and were overwhelmed, torn to pieces or taken by the Beast and turned against their comrades. The rest scrambled up the slope, toward the second trench, trying to stay ahead of the wave of madness and death. One of them, thinking of his duty even in the midst of panic, grabbed Raesinia by the arm and dragged her along, stumbling up the rocky ground between the trenches to where the volunteers waited. Musket-​fire was crackling again, balls zipping past despite the danger of hitting a friend.

  “Charge!” someone was shouting. Raesinia caught a glimpse of a uniformed soldier standing beside a knot of volunteers who’d gathered around their makeshift flag, a Vordanai eagle sewn on a blue field by awkward, untrained hands. “We have to charge!”

  No one was charging. The volunteers stood behind their breastwork, firing as fast as they could load, smoke billowing along the trench. Below, men were scrambling out of the way, but enough of the attackers wore blue uniforms that they were impossible to distinguish from those who’d taken flight. The terrified volunteers shot at anything that moved, cutting down Third Regiment men and red-​eyes alike. Raesinia tumbled over the breastwork and lay for a moment in the bottom of the trench, half-​stunned. She pulled herself to her feet just in time to see the next wave of red-​eyes break from the smoke and come up the hillside at a dead sprint. There were screams and shots, and then the volunteers were running, throwing down their weapons and scrambling up the hill to stay ahead of their pursuers.

  We have to stop them. Raesinia gritted her teeth and ran for the flag just as the man who held it tossed it aside and took to his heels. The officer who’d been leading the volunteers was long gone, and only a few men remained, frozen in place by terror. Raesinia grabbed the flagpole and brought it back up, the blue and silver now smeared with mud.

  “Here!” she screamed, scraping her throat raw. “Stand here!”

  Shots zipped past in both directions. Almost alone in the trench, Raesinia watched the shadows of the red-​eyes approach through the smoke. Very brave of me. Her thoughts felt detached. Or it would be, if I could die. She wondered what would happen if the red-​eyes ripped her to pieces. Would I have to go find my arms and legs? Or would they grow back?

  Except. Winter had told her what had happened when the Beast had taken Elysium. The Penitent Damned, who’d had demons of their own, had been absorbed just like any of its other bodies. It had banished their demons, taken their minds.

  For the first time since that awful night beneath the palace half a decade ago, Raesinia realized, she was in real danger. Not from a musket ball or a sword st
roke, but from the horrible, annihilating light of those red eyes. If they caught her, she would end, cease to be once and for all. Or else be stuck in some horrible half-​life, like Janus.

  Her knees suddenly refused to hold her weight, and her bowels churned. She sat down heavily, barely keeping the flag upright.

  What’s wrong with me? It took a moment to figure it out. Oh. I’m terrified.

  Is this how ordinary people feel all the time?

  The first red-​eye—a lanky man with a fur cap and a hunter’s look, a long knife in one hand—leapt into the trench. Raesinia screamed and swung the flagpole, the staff cracking him on the head and sending him stumbling sideways. She surged back to her feet, fighting the desperate urge to throw the stupid thing down and flee. It’s just a flag. Just cloth and thread. What the hell is it good for?

  “Stand here!” Her voice cracked. “Stand here!”

  More red-​eyes were crossing the breastwork, soldiers and civilians, some who’d been fighting for the other side minutes before. A Third Regiment soldier, eyes aglow, jumped down in front of Raesinia with bayonet raised, while the hunter came at her from the left. She managed to block the bayonet thrust with the flagpole, but the hunter grabbed her by the arm and collar, lifting her easily off the ground. She kicked him in the groin, hard, but he barely flinched, and pulled her close to his face.

  “The queen!” someone was shouting in the distance. All of Raesinia’s attention was on the hunter’s eyes, the dark pupils replaced with a rising red glow, growing brighter and brighter until it filled the world.

  “Rally to the queen!”

  A bayonet entered the side of the hunter’s head with such force that it embedded itself to the hilt in his skull. The red glow died, and the grip on Raesinia’s collar slackened. The flagstaff fell from her numb fingers, but she saw it taken up again before it hit the ground, muddy banner waving.

  “Your Highness!” A woman’s voice. Raesinia looked at her. Abby. Her freckled face was splashed with gore. “Are you all right?”