Empire from the Ashes

Chapter Thirty-Eight

"Get those guns up! Move! Move, damn you!"

Tibold Rarikson raged back and forth, eyes blazing, as the Angels' Army swarmed like an angry hive. It was insane to launch a major assault with no preplanning, yet he forced his fear aside and drove his men like one of the demons the Temple claimed they worshiped. He knew Lord Sean had beaten off the first attack, but he also knew his commander was trapped inside a city of two million enemies.

A stream of arlaks rumbled past him, nioharqs lowing, and he gripped his hands together behind him. The top of the Temple's wall mounted its own guns, but it was far narrower than its base, which limited recoil space. The Guard could put nothing heavier than arlaks up there, and he had room to deploy far more pieces than they could bring to bear. Unfortunately, their guns were protected by stone battlements, whereas his people lacked even the time to dig gun pits. Spurts of smoky thunder already crowned the wall, yet he had no choice but to send his own artillery forward. The North Gate had slammed shut in his face; without scaling ladders, his only hope was to batter it down, and he already knew how hideous his losses were going to be.

Regiments ran to join the assault column, but there was no time to insure proper organization. It was all going to be up to the battalion and company commanders, and Tibold breathed a prayer of thanks for the months of combat experience those men had gained.

"Tibold!"

He turned in surprise as the Angel Harry grabbed his right arm. Before he could speak, she'd yanked it out and strapped something around it.

"My Lady?" He peered at the strange bracelet in confusion. It was made of some material he'd never seen before, with a small grill of some sort and two lights that blazed bright green even in full sunlight.

"This is called a 'com,' Tibold. Speak into this—" the angel tapped the grill "—and Sean and I will be able to hear you. Hold it close to your ear, and you'll be able to hear us, as well." Tibold gawked at her, then closed his mouth and nodded. "I'll try to tell you what's happening in the city as you advance," she went on urgently, her beautiful face strained, "but there're so many buildings the information I can give you may be limited. I'll do my best, and at least you can talk to Sean this way."

"Thank you, My Lady!" Tibold gazed into her single anxious eye for a moment, then surprised himself by throwing his arms around her. He hugged her tightly, and his voice was low. "We'll get them out, My Lady. I swear it."

"I know you will," she whispered, hugging him back, and his eyes widened as she kissed his whiskered cheek. "Now go, Tibold. And take care of yourself. We all need you."

He nodded again and turned to run for the head of the column.

His guns were unlimbering in a solid line, sixty arlaks hub-to-hub in a shallow curve before the gate. Defending guns lashed at them, but even at this short range and packed so tightly, an individual arlak was a small target for the best gunner. Their crews were another matter. He heard men scream as round shot tore them apart, but like his infantry, these men had learned their horrible trade well. Fresh gunners stepped forward to take the places of the dead as gun captains primed and cocked their locks, and Tibold raised the strange bracelet—the "com"—to his mouth.

"Lord Sean?"

"Tibold? Is that you?" Lord Sean sounded surprised, and the Angel Harry's voice came over the link, speaking the angels' language.

"I gave him a security com, Sean. If the computer hasn't reacted to your implants or our com traffic—"

"Good girl!" Sean said quickly, and shifted to Pardalian. "What is it, Tibold?"

"We're ready to come after you. Where are you?"

"We've occupied a Guard ordnance depot near the Place of Martyrs." Despite his obvious tension, Lord Sean managed a chuckle. "Good thing the First has ex-Guard joharns. There must be a million rounds of smoothbore ammo in the place when the rifle bullets run out!"

"Hold on, Lord Sean! We'll get you out."

"We'll be here, Tibold. Be careful."

Tibold lowered the com and turned to his artillery commander.

"Fire!"

High Priest Vroxhan stormed into the conference room Lord Marshal Surak had converted into a command post, and his face was livid. Guns thudded in the background from the direction of North Gate, but the furious high priest ignored them as he bore down on Surak.

"Well, Lord Marshal?" he snapped. "What do you have to say for yourself? What went wrong?"

"Holiness," Surak held his temper only with difficulty, despite Vroxhan's rank, "I told you this would be difficult. Most of my men knew no more of what we intended than the heretics did—or High-Captain Kerist." His voice was sharp, and Vroxhan blinked as the lord marshal's eyes blazed angrily into his. "You insisted on 'surprise,' Holiness, and you got it—for everyone!"

The high priest began a hot reply, then strangled it stillborn. He could deal with Surak's insolence later; for now, he needed this man.

"Very well, I stand rebuked. But what happened to the attack in the Place of Martyrs?"

"Somehow the heretics realized what was coming. Something must have warned them only after they entered the city, or they simply wouldn't have come, but they guessed in time to form battle-lines before our pikes could hit them. As for what happened then, you saw as well as I, I'm sure, Holiness. No other army on Pardal could have produced that much fire; our men never expected anything like it, and they broke. I estimate," he added bitterly, "that close to half of them were killed or wounded first."

"And now?"

"Now we have them penned up in the Tanners Street ordnance depot." The lord marshal grimaced. "That, unfortunately, means they now have plenty of ammunition when their own runs out, but we control all the streets between them and the gates. Their musketry won't help them much in a street fight, and we can starve them out, if we must. Assuming we have time."

"Time?" Vroxhan repeated sharply, and Surak nodded grimly.

"The rest of their army's about to assault North Gate, Holiness, and at your orders, we didn't tell the men on the wall what we intended, either."

"You mean they may actually break into the Temple?!" Vroxhan gasped.

"I mean, Holiness, that our guns are manned and we're rushing in more infantry, but if they hit fast enough, they may get through the tunnel before we can ready the oil. If that happens, then, yes, they can break in."

"Dear God!" Vroxhan whispered, and it was the lord marshal's turn to smile. It was a grim smile, but it wasn't defeated.

"Holiness, I would never have chosen to fight them here, but it may actually work in our favor." Vroxhan looked at him in disbelief, and the lord marshal made an impatient gesture. "Holiness, I've told you again and again: it's their range and firepower that makes them so dangerous in the field. Well, there's no open terrain in the Temple. The streets will break up their firing lines, every building will become a strong point, and they'll have to come at us head-on, with bayonets against our pikes. This may be the best chance we'll ever have to crush their main field army, and if we do, we can capture their weapons and find out how they've improved their range and rates of fire."

Vroxhan blinked, and then his face smoothed as understanding struck.

"Exactly, Holiness. If we hold them here, smash this army, copy their weapons, and then concentrate our own strength from other areas, we can win this war after all."

"I—" Vroxhan began, then stiffened at the sudden, brazen bellow of far more artillery than North Gate's defenders could bring to bear.

A wall of smoke spewed upward as the arlaks recoiled, and splinters flew as their shot smashed into the city gates. Scores of holes appeared in the stout timbers, but they held, and the gunners sprang into the deadly ballet Lord Sean and Lord Tamman had taught them. Sponges hissed down bores, bagged charges and fresh shot followed, and the guns roared again.

The defending artillery fired in desperate counterbattery, but fewer guns could be crammed in along the walls, they couldn't match the Malagorans' rate of fire, and the wind carried the thick clouds of smoke up towards them in a solid, blinding bank. The Guard's guns could kill and maim Tibold's gunners, but they couldn't silence his pieces, and the gates sagged as hurricanes of eight-kilo shot smashed them. The outermost portcullis and gate went down in ruins, but the gunners went on firing, pouring a maelstrom of shot down the narrow gullet of the gate tunnel. Tibold could no more see what was happening to the second and third gates than the next man, but that massive barrage had to be ripping them apart in turn.

He paced back and forth, gnawing his lip and trying to gauge his moment. If he waited too long, the defenders would be ready to deluge his men with oil; if he committed his column too soon, it would find itself halted by intact gates, and aside from hastily impressed wagon tongues, it had no battering rams. The losses he was going to take from the wall's artillery as he charged would be terrible; if his men had to retreat under fire from a gate they couldn't breach, they would also be useless.

Another salvo rolled out from his gun line, and another. Another. He paced harder, hovering on the brink of committing himself and then dragging himself back. He had to wait. Wait as long as he dared to be sure—

He jerked in pain as the "com" on his wrist suddenly bit him. He snatched his hand up in front of him, staring at the bracelet, and the Angel Harry's taut voice came from it.

"The middle gate must be down, Tibold! We can see shot coming through the innermost ones, and they're hanging by a thread!"

See them? How could even an angel see—? He bit off the extraneous question and held the com to his lips.

"What else can you see, Lady Harry?" he demanded.

"They've got a line of infantry waiting for you." Harriet deliberately spoke in a flat, clear voice despite her fear for Sean while she relayed the reports from Brashan's hastily redeployed orbital arrays. "It looks like two or three thousand pikes, but only a few hundred musketeers. They've brought up a battery—we can't tell if they're chagors or arlaks—in support. That's all so far, but more guns and men will be there within twenty minutes. If you're going, you have to go now, Tibold!"

The head of Tibold's column was the Twelfth Brigade. Its men stood two hundred meters behind their own guns, and they were white-faced and taut, for they understood the carnage waiting in and beyond that narrow tunnel. There were none of the usual jokes and anxious banter men used to hide their fear from one another. This time they stood silent, each man isolated in his own small world of gnawing tension despite the men standing at his shoulders. The thunder of their own guns pulsed in their blood like the beating of someone else's heart, and already they had over a hundred dead and wounded from the arlaks on the Temple's wall. They were too far out for grapeshot, and the defenders had been concentrating on efforts to silence Tibold's artillery, but that was going to change the instant the infantry started forward.

Their heads jerked up as High-Captain Tibold appeared before them. He faced them with blazing eyes, and his leather-lunged bellow cut through even the thunder of the guns.

"Malagorans!" he shouted. "You know all Lord Sean and the angels have done for us; now he, Lord Tamman, and the Angel Sandy have been betrayed! Unless we cut our way to them, they, and all our comrades with them, will die! Men of the Twelfth, will you let that happen?"

"NOOO!" the Twelfth roared, and Tibold drew his sword.

"Then let's go get them out! Twelfth Brigade, at a walk, advance!"

Whistles shrilled, pipes began to wail, and the men of the Twelfth gripped their rifles in sweat-slick hands and moved forward.

The artillerists on the walls didn't notice them at first. Smoke clogged visibility, and the thunder of their own guns covered the whistles and the drone of the pipes. But the Malagoran arlaks had to check fire as the advancing infantry masked their fire, and the Guard knew then. Powder-grimed gunners relaid their pieces, grapeshot replaced round, and they waited for the smoke to lift and give them a target.

"Double time!" the Twelfth's officers screamed, and the column picked up speed. They had six hundred paces to go, and they moved forward at a hundred and thirty paces a minute as the wind parted the smoke.

The defenders watched them come, and musketeers dashed along the wall, spreading out between the guns. The Guard didn't have many of them left, but four hundred settled into firing position and checked their priming as the Twelfth's advance accelerated. Six hundred paces. Five hundred. Four.

"Malagor and Lord Sean!" the Twelfth's commander bellowed, and his men howled the high, terrible Malagoran yell and sprang into a full run.

A curtain of flame blasted out from the wall, twenty guns spewing grapeshot into a packed formation at a range of barely three hundred meters. Hundreds of men went down as quarter-kilo buckshot smashed through them, but other men hurdled their shattered bodies at a dead run, and their speed took them in under the artillery's maximum depression before the gunners could reload. Guard musketeers leaned out over the parapet, exposing themselves to fire straight down into them as they reached the base of the wall, and the artillery poured fresh fire into the men behind them, but six full regiments of riflemen laced the battlements with suppressive fire. Scores of Guard musketeers died, and artillerists began to fall, as well, as bullets swept their embrasures. Fresh smoke turned morning into Hell's own twilight, men screamed and cursed and died, and the Twelfth Brigade's bleeding battalions slammed into the shot-riddled outer gate.

Massive, broken timbers collapsed under the impact of hurtling bodies and plunged downward, crushing dozens of men and pinning others, but the Twelfth lunged onward. There was no blazing oil from the murder holes, but Guardsmen fired joharns and pistols through them into the reeking, smoke-filled horror of the tunnel. The second gate still stood precariously, too riddled to last but enough to slow the Twelfth's headlong pace for just a moment, and another ninety men were piled dead before it when it finally went down.

The Twelfth drove onward, carried by a blood-mad fury beyond sanity and driven by the weight of numbers behind them, and a storm of musket fire met them as they slammed through the third and final gate at last. Arlaks bellowed, blasting them with case shot at less than sixty meters, and men slipped and fell on blood-slick stone as the brigade broke out into the open. Men fired their rifles on the run, still charging forward, and slammed into the waiting pikes like a bleeding, dying hammer.

The impact staggered the Guardsmen. Their longer weapons gave them a tremendous advantage in this headlong clash, but the Malagorans rammed onward, and more and more of them swept out of the tunnel. They overwhelmed the front ranks of pikes, burying them under their own bodies, and the Guard gave back—first one step, then another—before the stunning ferocity of that charge. They weren't fighting men; they were fighting an elemental force. For every Malagoran they killed, two more surged forward, and every one of those charging maniacs fired at pointblank range before he closed with the bayonet. Behind them, other men with lengths of burning slow match lit fuses, and powder-filled, iron hand grenades arced through the smoky air to burst amid the Guard's ranks. Here and there, their front broke, and Malagorans funneled forward into the holes, bayonets stabbing, taking men in the flank even as the Guard's charging reserve cut them down in turn. There was no end to the flood of howling heretics, and Guardsmen began to look over their shoulders for the reinforcements they'd been promised.

More Malagorans charged through the gate tunnel, and still more. The space between the wall and the pikes was a solid mass of men, each fighting to get forward to kill at least one Guardsman before he died. The casualty count was overwhelmingly in the Guard's favor, but the Malagorans seemed willing to take any losses, and at last, slowly, the pikes began to crumble. Here a man went down screaming; there another began to edge back; to one side, another dropped his pike and turned to run; and the Malagorans drove forward with renewed ferocity as they sensed the shifting tide.

The Guard's officers did everything mortal men could do, but mortal men couldn't stop that frenzied charge, and what had begun slowly spread and accelerated. A stubborn withdrawal became first a retreat, then a rout, and the Malagorans swarmed over any man who tried to stand while others fought their way meter by bloody meter up the stairs on the wall's inner face. The last of the pikemen, abandoned by their fellows, turned to run, and the baying Malagoran army swept into the city.

Two hundred of the Twelfth Brigade were still on their feet to join it.

"We're through the gate, Lord Sean!" Tibold shouted into the com. "We're through the gate!"

"I know, Tibold." Sean closed his eyes, and tears streaked his face, for he was tied into Brashan's orbital arrays. The smoke and chaos made it impossible to sort out details from orbit, even for Imperial optics, but he didn't need details to know thousands of his men lay dead or wounded.

"Watch it, Tibold!" Harriet's voice cut into the circuit. "The men you routed just ran into their reinforcements. You've got ten or twenty thousand fresh troops coming at you, and the survivors from the gates are rallying behind them!"

"Let them come!" the ex-Guardsman exulted. "We hold the gate now. They can't keep us out, and I'll take them in a straight fight any day, Lady Harry!"

"Sean, you've got more men coming at you, too," Harriet warned.

"I see 'em, Harry."

"Hang on, Lord Sean!" Tibold said urgently.

"We will," Sean promised grimly, and opened his eyes. "Pass the word, Folmak. They're coming in from the east and west."

"What's happening, Lord Marshal?" Vroxhan demanded edgily as a panting messenger handed Surak a message. The lord marshal scanned it, then crumpled it in his fist.

"The heretics have carried the gates, Holiness."

"God will strengthen our men," Vroxhan promised.

"I hope you're right, Holiness," Surak said grimly. "High-Captain Therah reports the heretics took at least two thousand casualties, and they're still driving forward, not even pausing to regroup. It would seem," he faced the high priest squarely, "their outrage at our treachery is even greater than I'd feared."

"We acted in the name of God, Lord Marshal!" Vroxhan snapped. "Do not dare presume to question God's will!"

"I didn't question His will," Surak said with dangerous emphasis. "I only observe that men enraged by betrayal can accomplish things other men cannot. Our losses will be heavy, Holiness."

"Then they'll be heavy!" Vroxhan glared at him, then slammed his fist on a map of the Temple with a snarl. "What of the heretic leaders?"

"A fresh attack is going in now, Holiness."

The ordnance depot's stone wall was for security, not serious defense. Two wide gateways pierced it to north and south, but Folmak's men had loopholed the wall, barricaded the gates with paving stones and artillery limbers, and wheeled captured arlaks into place to fire out them. It wasn't much of a fort, but it was infinitely preferable to trying to stand in the streets or squares of the city.

The surviving Guardsmen of the original ambush surrounded the depot, reinforced by several thousand more men and four batteries of arlaks. Now their guns moved up along side streets that couldn't be engaged from the gateways. The Guard's gunners had learned what happened to artillerists who unlimbered in range of rifles, and they dragged their batteries into the warehouses that flanked the depot. Hammers and axes smashed crude gunports in warehouse walls, and arlak muzzles thrust out through them.

Sean saw it coming, but there was nothing he could do to prevent it. Ammunition parties had hauled cases of Guard musket balls out of the depot and issued them to his men, who had orders to use the smoothbore ammunition for close range fighting and conserve their rifle ammunition, and he stood in a window of the depot commander's office and watched stone dust and wooden splinters fly from the warehouse walls as picked marksmen fired on the small targets the improvised gunports offered. Some of their shots were going home, and no doubt at least a few were actually hitting someone, but not enough to stop the enemy's preparations.

And then the arlaks began to bark.

Eight-kilo balls fired at less than sixty meters slammed into the depot wall, and it had never been meant to resist artillery. Lumps of rock flew, and he clenched his jaw.

"They're going to blow breaches, then put in the pikes," he told Folmak harshly. "Start a couple of companies building barricades behind the wall. Use whatever they can find, and see about parking some more arlaks among them. We'll let them blow their breach, then open up when they come through."

"At once, Lord Sean!" Folmak slapped his breastplate and vanished, and Sandy crossed to Sean.

"I wish to hell you hadn't come," he rasped. "Goddamn it, what did you think you were doing?"

"Saving your butt, among other things!" she shot back, but her words lacked their usual tartness, and she touched his elbow. "How bad is it, Sean?" she asked in a softer voice. "Can we hold?"

"No," he said flatly. "They'll just keep throwing men at us—or stand back and batter us with artillery. Sooner or later, the First is going down."

"Unless Tibold gets here first," she said through the thunder of the guns.

"Unless Tibold gets here first," he agreed grimly.