by David Weber
"Too bad," Mesaion grunted, then turned to his own Flicker. "Inform Regiment-Captain chan Skrithik that the enemy is landing at the second location and that we can't bring it under fire."
"Yes, Sir."
* * *
"Damn it," chan Skrithik muttered as Isia read him Mesaion's terse dispatch.
He'd been afraid of that when Janaki indicated the landing areas on the map. The one in question would have been out of range for the mortars, anyway, although the howitzers had the reach. He doubted these Arcanan bastards had any way of knowing that, but they'd lucked out and chosen a landing site in the dead ground beyond a steep, intervening ridgeline.
"Tell Company-Captain Mesaion I want chan Forcal to keep them under observation. Let me know the instant they begin to move out."
"Yes, Sir."
* * *
"Five Hundred Urlan's in position, Sir," the hummer-handler announced.
"Good." Harshu turned to Toralk. "I suppose that means it's time, Klayrman."
"Yes, Sir. It is." Toralk nodded, then looked at the hummer-
handler. "Send Hundred Kormas the release order, Senior Sword."
"Yes, Sir!"
The hummer-handler opened the smaller cage in which he had set aside the hummer with the release order already recorded. Now he took the small, fiercely aggressive little creature in his hands, whispered something to it, and tossed it into the air. Its wings blurred into invisibility, and it turned like a questing hound, hovering in midair. Then, sudden as a snapping arbalest string, it flashed away.
Toralk watched it disappear and fought down an urge to inhale deeply and surreptitiously. He remained far from certain that continuing the attack was the right move, but that no longer really mattered. First, because it wasn't his decision; second, because everyone was committed now. Commander of One Hundred Surtel Kormas would release his gryphons five minutes after he received Toralk's dispatch, and the gryphons' onslaught would be the signal for the rest of the assault.
Graholis, I hope this works, the thousand thought fervently. Please let this work!
* * *
"Regiment-Captain!"
Rof chan Skrithik turned quickly back to Janaki. Something had changed in the prince's voice. The fort's commander couldn't quite identify what that change was, but whatever it was, it sent a fresher, deeper surge of anxiety through him.
"Yes, Your Highness?"
"It's starting." Janaki turned to look at him, and the distant focus in his eyes was deeper and darker than ever. "Listen to me," he said, and there was a stark edge of command in his voice. "I don't know how much time there'll be. It won't be enough, however much of it there is. So it's important. Listen to what I tell you."
"Of course, Your Highness." Chan Skrithik was puzzled. Of course anything Prince Janaki had to tell him was "important." Did Janaki think chan Skrithik would have allowed him to stand up here, Chief-Armsman chan Braikal or not, if it wasn't important?
"I can't tell yet," Janaki sounded far more frustrated. "I can't tell which is the real attack yet."
He wheeled back around, staring out across the parapet. Then his head tilted back. He looked up into the sky above the fort, his head swinging from side to side.
"Not yet," he told the bright, cloudless heavens in a strange tone which mingled command and entreaty in almost equal measure. "Not yet!"
For a moment, nothing else happened. Then his falcon launched from his shoulder with a high, fierce cry, and he sucked in a deep breath.
"They're coming!" His arm shot out and he pointed sharply to the northwest. "There!"
* * *
Fifty Fahrlo watched the strike gryphons go streaking past the transports and his escorting battle dragons. The gryphons were far smaller, tiny, compared to the dragons, but there were over a hundred of them, and he was delighted that they were at least a thousand feet higher than his own formation. Fahrlo had a lively respect for the men who worked as gryphon-handlers. He trusted their professionalism implicitly, yet he'd seen what gryphons could do, and he wanted no part of it. If the compulsion spells failed, or if those spells misidentified the gryphons' target, enough of them could swarm even a dragon out of the heavens.
This time, though, there was no mistake. The gryphons swept onward, driving towards the smoke-gouting fort like a plague of pony-sized locusts, and Fahrlo smiled thinly behind his visor.
Should've let them swarm the bastards in the first place, he thought, even though he knew precisely why it hadn't seemed necessary. I bet they won't like this one little bit!
* * *
"Sir, I think—yes!" The lookout floating on his levitation spell at the end of the long tether to his saddle shouted down to Commander of Five Hundred Gyras Urlan. "The gryphons are in position!"
"Good!" Urlan barked. "Now get your ass back down here!"
"Yes, Sir!"
"Bugler!"
"Yes, Sir?"
"Blow 'Walk'!"
"Yes, Sir!"
The bugle began to sound, and the big, heavily augmented horses of the Seventh Zydor Heavy Dragoons stirred into movement. They had a long way to go, and so they moved without haste. The time for that would come, but it wasn't here yet. Not yet. They were bigger—much bigger—than the light cavalry's unicorns, and despite their augmentation, that meant they were slower, with less endurance, as well. Their speed and strength had to be conserved for the final dash to their objective. But that was all right. The gryphons wouldn't attack immediately. The compulsion spells directing their strike had been carefully structured to give Urlan's cavalry time to get into position.
The heavy horses' larger size meant each of them could carry not one rider, but two, and two of Urlan's hundred-and-twenty-strong companies were configured as standard heavy dragoons. Each horse bore a two-man saddle, with the rear rider armed not with a saber or lance but with a cutdown version of an infantry-dragon. It was much shorter ranged than the infantry weapon, but longer ranged than any arbalest and far more deadly.
Each horse in Commander of One Hundred Orkal Kiliron's Charlie Company, on the other hand, carried only a standard saddle, instead of the two-man heavy dragoon version. In place of the normal second rider, a smaller version of the standard dragon cargo pod had been harnessed to each horse. Its comparatively diminutive size was small enough for an augmented horse to handle without too much trouble, but still big enough to carry a full twelve-man infantry squad. A quarter of those pods were occupied by Gifted engineering specialists; the others contained over a thousand picked infantry. And one basis for their selection was that at least half of them had at least some Gift.
Enough, at any rate, for them to be armed with daggerstones for the assault.
"Activate the glamour," Urlan said to the Gifted commander of fifty at his side.
"Yes, Sir."
* * *
"That's it."
Janaki's voice was suddenly calm, almost quiet, and chan Skrithik jerked his eyes away from the small dots, circling above Fort Salby with a hungry eagerness he could sense even from here. They seemed very close, those dots, but if they were the size the prince had described, then they were much higher than they looked.
"I beg your pardon, Your Highness?"
"I See now," Janaki said, and turned his back on the circling dots to face the regiment-captain with a strangely serene little smile. "I didn't think there was going to be enough time."
"Your Highness?" Something about Janaki's voice, the way his body language had somehow relaxed, worried chan Skrithik.
"Listen." Janaki put his hands on chan Skrithik's shoulders, pulling the older man so close to him their foreheads almost touched. "The eagle-lions are going to attack in just a few minutes. They'll come in from the west. When they do, we'll see the dragons coming in behind them."
The prince's words came quickly, with a sort of distant urgency. Chan Skrithik might have been fooled by their quietness, but he saw something behind the ghosts in those gray eyes. He saw ferocious purpose, determi
nation, and his own eyes narrowed with the intensity of his concentration on what Janaki was saying.
"They'll have infantry on the dragons. Some of the dragons will be spitting fire or lightning. They'll have more infantry on lines, ready to drop over the parapet. They'll use the eagle-lions to try to suppress our fire. But the dragons aren't the real threat. They're a diversion, Regiment-Captain. They want us looking at them while the real attack comes in from behind us, from the east. Do you understand? The dragons and their infantry are the diversion, not the cavalry. Do you understand?"
Chan Skrithik nodded, and Janaki looked past him for a moment at Senior-Armsman Isia.
"Warn Company-Captain Mesaion. The cavalry have some sort of . . . spell. It's like a smokescreen, but different. It'll look more like a mirage—like heat shimmer. But the cavalry will be behind it. Most of the men won't be able to see through it, but chan Forcal can. He's got to get Mesaion's first rounds on target—on the ranks around their standard. It's a wind sock, like one of the Arpathian dragon-standards. That's where their commander is—where the spell will be coming from. Do you understand?"
Isia darted a look at chan Skrithik. The regiment-captain nodded, and the Flicker swallowed hard, then produced a jerky nod of his own.
"Yes. Yes, Your Highness!"
Janaki's head swiveled back to chan Skrithik while Isia's frenzied pencil started scribbling the message to Mesaion. The black dots overhead were beginning to widen their circle. Chan Skrithik was vaguely aware of them, sensed the way they were straining at some immaterial leash, but most of his attention was focused on Janaki chan Calirath and the prophetic fire burning in his eyes.
"They've got those fire-throwers on some of the horses. And some of the others are towing carriers—floating carriers, like hot-air balloons—with more infantry in them. They'll try to get the carriers in close enough to assault the parapet—use them like scaling ladders. And if they can't get over the wall, they'll go through it. They've got people with spells that can open breaches—like blasting charges, but different. They'll have to reach the wall to actually use them. They'll try for the dead spot at the southeast corner, where the fire will cover them and none of the machine guns or pedestal guns will bear. You have to get men with grenades over there now. Do you understand?"
Chan Skrithik felt himself nodding again as Janaki repeated the three-word question like some sort of mantra.
"See to it, Chief," he said to chan Braikal. The Marine stared at him for one instant, then turned almost agonized eyes to Janaki. He hesitated a heartbeat longer, but the crown prince gave him a smile and twitched his head, confirming chan Skrithik's order, and chan Braikal thundered off, shouting for the other members of his platoon.
"Some of the infantry have the same sort of smaller fire-throwers," Janaki went on, the machine-gun words coming with almost impossible clarity yet simultaneously seeming to trip and fall over one another. "If the ones with the blasting charges touch the wall, they'll blow through it. The fire-throwers have less range than a revolver, but they'll kill anyone they hit and each of them is good for several shots. And they've got other people with them—people with spells like a Lifter's, only better. They can actually Lift people up over the parapet without using ladders or the carriers if they can get close enough."
The circling dots were plunging downward now. Rifles began to crack. The surviving machine guns on the parapet began to fire, as well, but the gryphons were smaller, faster, and far more agile targets. The men Janaki had insisted on arming with the more rapidly firing Model 7s were going to be far more effective than riflemen, but the shotguns were also much shorter ranged. The men armed with them had to wait for the gryphons to come to them.
"Remember, Sir." Janaki's eyes burned into Roth chan Skrithik's soul, and his hands slid down from the regiment-captain's shoulders to grip the front of his uniform tunic. "Remember—the dragons are the diversion. They won't risk them in close. They've lost too many. It's the cavalry. You've got to stop the cavalry. If you stop it, they'll break off the attack. They won't take additional losses—not this far from home. But if the cavalry gets through, gets inside the walls, it's over. You can't—"
He broke off suddenly, and his eyes dropped abruptly back into focus. They were suddenly once again the clear, gray eyes of a young man, not the eyes of an avatar of legends.
"It's here."
His voice had changed, too. It was almost—almost—normal again.
"Good luck, Sir," he said, and his hands locked on chan Skrithik's tunic. The regiment-captain's eyes just had time to begin to widen, and then Janaki picked him bodily up and threw him off the gun platform. Chan Skrithik landed on the fighting step three feet below—landed so hard, so awkwardly, that he broke the bones in his left forearm into gravel.
He scarcely noticed the white-hot agony of those snapping, shattered bones. It was so small, so unimportant, in comparison.
Janaki chan Calirath never even turned his head. He was still looking at chan Skrithik when the gryphon he'd never seen with his physical eyes at all hit him from behind and killed him instantly.
'Chapter Thirty
The gryphons hit Fort Salby like a tidal wave of ferocity wrapped up in feathers, talons, and fur.
The men on the fort's walls had never seen anything like them. But then, they'd never seen anything like quite a lot of what they were seeing this day. And if they'd never seen them before, at least they'd had them described to them by officers who had been briefed by Crown Prince Janaki. Those briefings defused much of the terror of the unknown. They didn't magically banish fear, didn't make dragons or gryphons any less monstrous, any less unnatural. But they set aside the paralyzing shock complete surprise might have achieved, and the men of Fort Salby were angry.
They knew about the negotiations. They knew the crown prince was right, that the Arcanans must have been carefully planning their offensive the entire time they'd been talking about negotiations and peaceful settlements. They'd drawn their own conclusions about what must have happened to the Voices down-chain from Traisum, and they knew they'd been supposed to be taken by surprise themselves and massacred in what they thought was peacetime.
They'd already smashed the first attack. The price might have been high, but they'd knocked those stupendous dragons out of the air, proven the Arcanans' magical creatures were indeed mortal, however wondrous they might appear. And so, as the gryphons swept down upon them, swinging wide to avoid overflying the infantry positions west of the fort, they were ready.
Rifle fire flamed across the parapet. The heavy machine guns which had wreaked such havoc against the dragons couldn't traverse quickly enough to engage the smaller, fleeter gryphons effectively, and even the rifles were less than completely effective. As good as the Model 10 was, it was still a bolt-action rifle engaging flying targets coming in at speeds of well over two hundred miles an hour.
Here and there, a gryphon's wings suddenly faltered, a beast fell out of the oncoming cloud of killers, but the rest kept coming.
The overhead cover which had been erected to protect the firing steps from fireballs proved at least partly effective against gryphons, as well. Some of the beasts flung themselves upon the sandbags, ripping at them, shredding them to get at the fragile human bodies beneath them. Others hurled themselves straight into the faces of the defenders, coming over the parapet, swarming into the gap between the overhead and the tops of the fort's walls. Still others swept past the parapets entirely, stooping on the unprotected men on the fort parade ground and in the gun pits.
Fourteen-inch bayonets turned rifles into short spears, thrusting frantically as two-foot beaks snapped like headsmen's axes. Here and there, wicked talons gripped rifles, snatching them aside, and everywhere men screamed in agony as bellies were opened, throats were ripped out, heads simply disappeared.
Revolvers cracked and shotguns began to bellow, thundering in rapid fire, spitting buckshot into tawny-hided killers, and gryphons shrieked in agony of their own.
It was all one mad, swirling sea of chaos.
Rof chan Skrithik saw the gryphon which had killed his prince. The creature flung back its head, bloody beak gaping in a scream of triumph, and then a feathered thunderbolt struck from above. Janaki's falcon hurled itself into the monster's face with a hissing shriek of pure fury, and the guillotine beak snapped ferociously as its small tormentor ripped bleeding furrows across its face and blinded one eye.
Taleena distracted the gryphon just long enough for chan Skrithik to drag out his revolver. The regiment-captain was aware of his prince, bleeding under the gryphon's ferocious talons, and he bared his teeth in savage hatred as his thumb cocked the hammer and the heavy weapon roared.
The gryphon screamed in fresh pain as the heavy bullet smashed into it. It turned away from Taleena, back towards chan Skrithik, and the regiment-captain shot it again. And again!
It went down at last with the fourth shot, and chan Skrithik felt hands pulling him back to his feet.
It was Senior-Armsman Isia, bleeding from a deep cut in his right cheek, his eyes wild.
"Sir! Are you all right, Sir?"
Chan Skrithik stared at the Flicker for two or three eternal heartbeats. All right? How could he ever be "all right" again? He ripped his eyes away from Isia, and they burned with unshed tears as he looked down at the dead young man at his feet. But then he shook himself. His prince had died to give him his final orders, and his lips drew back.
"Message!" he barked at Isia.
"Yes, Sir!"
Isia dragged out his notepad, holding it to one side to avoid bleeding on it.
"I want Platoon-Captain chan Noth over at the southeastern tower—now! He's to do whatever it takes to hold that wall!"
"Yes, Sir!"
Isia's pencil slashed at the pad. He stuffed the hastily written order into a message canister and Flicked it on its way.
"Message to Sunlord Markan," chan Skrithik continued without a break. "Begin: Expect heavy cavalry attack from southeast. Expect fire-throwers. Imperative the enemy not reach the fort's walls with blasting spells."
