Hell Hath No Fury

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Company-Captain Silkash tried to conceal his anxiety as the pair of hard-faced Arcanan guards marched him across Fort Ghartoun's parade ground. The surgeon's eyes flitted around busily, taking in everything he could see, and the mind behind those eyes was equally busy.

The Arcanans had decided to use the stables as an improvised holding area for the bulk of their prisoners. Despite the heavy casualties the eagle-lions had inflicted, there were well over four hundred of those prisoners, and finding a place to put them all obviously hadn't been easy. Silkash wouldn't normally have considered a stable a very secure prison, but the Arcanans had come prepared. The surgeon still had no idea how this "magic" of theirs worked, but the gleaming web which had been stretched across every opening in the stable buildings looked depressingly effective. It was clearly visible even in full daylight, and the Arcanans had completely ringed the stable with the glittering tubes of their fireball-throwers as a pointed warning to any Sharonians who might have entertained notions about somehow finding a way through its close-meshed glow.

The officers, on the other hand, had been kept separate from the enlisted and the noncoms. Which, Silkash reflected wryly, had given them an unanticipated opportunity to experience Fort Ghartoun's hospitality from the same perspective as their recent "guests," although they were packed considerably tighter in the cells than their Arcanan POWs had been Of course, his eyes darkened, there had been a few other differences between their own experiences and those of their Arcanan POWs.

Anger smoldered like slow lava down inside the medical officer. There'd been no opportunity for anyone to make any formal reports to him or to Regiment-Captain Velvelig, but there'd been at least some contact with some of the non-officer prisoners. They'd heard what had happened to chan Tergis, and the Voice wasn't the only Sharonian who'd been killed in cold blood after surrendering. To have his men treated that way, especially after Velvelig had been so insistent upon treating his prisoners with respect and dignity, had filled the Arpathian with a white-hot rage. Despite the regiment-captain's self-control, Silkash had literally felt the heat of that anger radiating from the other man.

And then, as suddenly as it had begun, the brutality had ended. It hadn't tapered off, it had simply stopped, like a locomotive when the steam was turned off. Silkash hoped that indicated that the savagery had never been authorized and had stopped as soon as higher authority learned about it, but he wasn't quite prepared to conclude that that was what had actually happened.

In the meantime, the main body of the invaders had clearly moved on. Which, he thought glumly, probably meant they'd already attacked Fort Mosanik by this time. It still seemed impossible, but if they'd managed to get from Hell's Gate to Fort Ghartoun as quickly as they had … .

His thoughts shifted focus abruptly as his guards pushed him up the steps to the veranda of the office block. They weren't particularly gentle about it, and the manacles holding his hands behind him made him awkward. He thought about registering some sort of protest, then decided that might not be the very smartest thing he could do.

They thrust him into the building, and he found himself being marched down the short hallway to what had been Velvelig's office. They opened the door and shoved him through it, and Silkash's lips tightened involuntarily as he saw Hadrign Thalmayr sitting behind Velvelig's desk.

The two guards withdrew, leaving Silkash standing in front of the desk. Thalmayr pointedly ignored him, keeping his attention on one of the omnipresent crystals these people seemed to take with them everywhere. This particular crystal was filled with floating words and letters in the Arcanan alphabet, and Silkash wondered what Thalmayr was studying so intently in order to emphasize his prisoner's total lack of importance.

Probably a laundry list, the surgeon told himself sourly. He's not smart enough for it to be anything more complicated than that!

He knew the sarcasm was nothing more than a defensive mechanism, the only shield against the uncertainty and fear simmering deep inside him he could come up with under the circumstances. To his surprise, it was rather comforting, anyway.

He stood there for several minutes. Then the door opened again, and Silkash's belly muscles tightened as Platoon-Captain Tobis Makree was shoved through it. This time, the guards didn't withdraw again, either. Instead, they stood back against the wall behind the prisoners, and Silkash's heart sank as he noted the heavy truncheons at their sides.

Thalmayr let the two Sharonians wait for at least another five minutes before he finally looked up from his crystal. Then he leaned back in Velvelig's chair, and his smile was thin and ugly.

"Well, well," he said after a moment. Or, at least, that was what the crystal on his desk said as it translated for him. Somehow, Silkash thought sinkingly, the fact that he was finally able and willing to communicate with them wasn't particularly reassuring.

"So, here we are," he continued after a heartbeat or two. "I've been looking forward to this morning. Do you know why?"

Neither Sharonian answered, and Thalmayr's smile grew even thinner. Then he nodded briefly to the guards, and Silkash cried out involuntarily as a heavy truncheon smashed into his kidneys from behind and the pain hammered him to his knees.

"I asked you a question," Thalmayr said. "Do know why I've been looking forward to this morning?"

Silkash looked up at him through a haze of sudden agony, then grunted as a heavy boot slammed into his ribs. He went down, trying to curl into a protective knot, and the boot crunched into him again. And again.

"No!" he heard Makree shout. "We don't know!"

"Really?" The amusement in Thalmayr's voice was as hungry as it was ugly, but at least the boots stopped hammering Silkash. "I'm astonished," the Arcanan continued. "The two of you, such conscientious 'healers.' So concerned about my well-being, so desperate to save my life, to cure my wounds. I can't believe such perceptive, compassionate people couldn't guess why I've been feeling so much anticipation all morning."

Thalmayr's voice seemed to be coming from a long way a way as Silkash forced himself not to whimper around the waves of pain rolling through him.

"Well," Thalmayr said, and the chair scraped across the floor as he stood, stretching hugely to draw deliberate attention to his restored mobility, "the answer is simple enough. Although I wasn't aware of it at the time, you gentlemen did your very best to help me. It embarrasses me deeply that I didn't realize that at the time. Fortunately, it's been explained to me since, and, I assure you, I'm more grateful for your efforts than I could ever possibly express."

The Arcanan's eyes were ugly, and he slowly and carefully pulled on a pair of thin leather gloves.

"I've thought and thought about how I might be able to express my gratitude to you," he continued as the smoothed the leather across the backs of his hands. "Unfortunately, even with the assistance of my PC

here, I don't think I have the words. So I've decided the best way to tell you-" he held out one gloved hand, and the nearer guard handed him his truncheon "-is to show you."

Hundred Geyrsof's fingers were steady in the control grooves as Graycloud led the 3012th Strike through the portal.

The yellow dragon flew strongly, steadily, sharing his pilot's eagerness as Geyrsof lay stretched out in the cockpit, watching the imagery displayed on his helmet's visor. Ahead of them, the eastern sky glowed with the approach of dawn, but the shadows shrouding the ground below was were still dense enough to make him a tiny bit nervous. The mountains about them weren't all that high, compared to many another, more impressive range, but he'd been impressed-almost awed-by the incredible cliffs his dragons had been forced to climb over just to get here. And if there were taller mountains in the multiverse, the rugged slopes of these mountains were more than solid enough to flatten any dragon careless enough to fly into them.

The mission planners were right to insist on waiting for dawn. The thought ran below the surface of Geyrsof's concentration on the steep, barren, poorly visible mountainsides streaking past beyond Graycloud's wingtips. We probably could have done this with less light … but I wouldn't have enjoyed it!

The old cliche about the dearth of "old, bold pilots" flickered in the back of his brain. Then he felt himself tightening inside as they reached the last waypoint and turned onto their final approach.

There! Geyrsof's eyes narrowed behind his visor as he saw the fort lying ahead of him, exactly where the maps said it should be. He looked through Graycloud's eyes, moving the crosshair while he prepared to climb high enough to gain a clear line of fire onto the fort's parade ground. But then something jabbed at the corner of his attention, and his eyes moved back to the shadows below the fort's wall.

What the hells? That's not supposed to be there … whatever the hells it is. It's-

He was still peering into the shadows, using Graycloud's vision to try to figure out what those dimly visible shapes and scars on the earth were, as the two yellows and their accompanying reds entered the final stretch of their approach valley … and the four Faraika II machine guns dug in on either side, just below the summit, opened fire.

Janaki chan Calirath had been standing on the raised gun platform between the gate bastions with Taleena on his shoulder for the last two hours. He'd stood there, almost motionless, gazing steadily into the west, and Rof chan Skrithik had stood equally silent at his other shoulder, with Senior-Armsman Orek Isia, Fort Salby's senior Flicker, by his side.

The regiment-captain felt … uncomfortable. Which, he reflected, was a pitifully pale word to describe his emotions at this moment. Part of him wished desperately that he'd gone ahead and ordered Janaki to the rear. Another part of him-the part charged with defending twelve hundred civilians, including his own wife-was desperately glad the prince and his Talent were here. And yet another part wondered if Janaki would have gone, even if he'd been ordered to.

And just who the hells would you have used to make him go if he'd refused, Rof? he asked himself wryly, glancing at the Marine standing respectfully behind the two officers. Chief-Armsman chan Braikal looked most unhappy, but chan Skrithik had no doubt whose orders the Marine would have followed if it had come to a choice between him and the Crown Prince of Ternathia.

Besides, when it came right down to it, Rof chan Skrithik was a Ternathian himself. He knew how valuable Janaki's life was. He also recalled the Caliraths' motto … and the quotation attributed to Emperor Halian over fifteen hundred years ago, when he'd rejected all of the arguments in favor of withdrawing from the defense of his Bolakini allies.

"It takes twenty years' training to make an Emperor," Halian had said. "It takes twenty centuries to make an Empire the world can trust."

Janaki chan Calirath understood what his ancestor had said all those centuries ago, chan Skrithik thought.

"What's that?" chan Braikal said suddenly. "There-above the southern hilltop?"

Chan Skrithik couldn't make out what the Marine was talking about, but Janaki answered him. The prince didn't even turn his head to look. He didn't have to … just as chan Skrithik didn't have to look into Janaki's gray eyes to see the shadows moving in their depths.

"It's starting, Chief," the crown prince said quietly.

"Still think it's a stupid place to put a machine gun?!" Paras chan Barsak shouted in Kardan Verais' right ear.

"Fuck, no!" Verais shouted back.

They had to shout, even though their heads were barely a foot apart, and even then they could scarcely hear one another. The cacophonous bellow of four .54-caliber machine guns tended to make it difficult to carry on a conversation. The heavy Faraikas couldn't sustain maximum-rate fire for very long without overheating catastrophically, but they didn't have to, either.

Each of the four machine gun emplacements on each side of the valley poured at least two hundred rounds at the monstrous beasts leading that airborne onslaught, and none of their targets even tried to dodge.

Cerlohs Myr watched in utter horror as both his remaining yellows ran straight into the massed fire of the Sharonian weapons which shouldn't have been there. Geyrsof and his wingman had been concentrating on their assigned target, not looking for machine guns on the tops of mountains a good mile and a half short of the target that didn't know they were coming. Myr had no idea what those guns were doing there. Indeed, he could hardly even find them! The brilliant flames of their muzzle flashes illuminated the shadows wrapped around their positions like chain-lightning, but they were so solidly dug-in, with so many sandbags and so much earth piled on top of their positions, that the muzzle flashes were all he could see.

Well, that and the consequences of those muzzle flashes.

Graycloud and Skykill seemed to stagger in midair. The fire wasn't even coming in from below, where their scales were thickest, and the massive bullets punched through their sides like white-hot awls. One of them-Myr had no idea which-managed to scream in mortal agony, and then both of them went smashing down out of the heavens in bloody, shattered ruin that bounced and skidded onward along the valley floor like toys that flailed broken wings like pitiful, tattered banners.

The three reds behind them went the same way before their pilots could react. The rest of the attack flight responded instinctively, rocketing steeply upward. But the deadly flanking fire tracked them as they climbed, and another red and one of the blacks went down, as well, before they could clear the threat zone.

Myr looked back from his own dragon as Razorwing bounded upward, and saw the broken bodies of seven-seven!-of his precious dragons and their pilots sprawled grotesquely across the valley floor.

The cheers were deafening.

Rof chan Skrithik found himself shouting right along with the rest of his men, bellowing his triumph, and he knew he was shouting even louder because of his reaction to the sheer size of the Arcanans'

winged monstrosities.

But Janaki wasn't cheering.

The crown prince reached out and caught chan Skrithik by the front of his uniform tunic. The regimentcaptain's eyes widened in surprise at the strength with which Janaki grabbed him and literally yanked him forward. He started to say something, but then Janaki turned his head to look at him, and chan Skrithik's mouth closed with a click.

He'd thought there were ghosts in his crown prince's gray gaze before; now he saw the reality.

Janaki's eyes were huge, the pupils far too dilated for the strengthening morning light, unfocused on anything of this world. They didn't seem to be looking at anything about him, and yet chan Skrithik had the eerie sensation that Janaki didn't simply see him; he Saw right through him.

"They aren't going to give up that easily," the Crown Prince of Ternathia said in the clear, distant voice of a Calirath in fugue state. "They'll be back-soon." He pointed directly overhead. "There."

Chan Skrithik nodded, and looked at Senior-Armsman Isia.

"Overhead watch," he said harshly. "Alert everyone."

"Yes, Sir!"

Isia saluted sharply, then closed his eyes, and one of the small stacks of message canisters on the parapet beside him began to disappear with the preplanned dispatches, written well ahead of time against this very moment.

Almost simultaneously, the canisters began to appear at their destinations. Company-Captain Mesaion glanced at his copy, and began shouting orders of his own.

Cerlohs Myr counted noses with a sense of total disbelief as his remaining dragons circled well to the west of those murderous machine guns.

After transfers and rearrangements to make up for his earlier losses, the 3012th had headed into action this morning with eleven dragons. Now it had only four … and both of his precious yellows were gone, simply blotted away.

He lay in his cockpit, forcing himself to think as clearly as possible despite the shock and white-hot rage blazing within him. The loss of seven battle dragons-seven!-before any of them had even fired a shot was far worse than merely devastating. It represented almost half of his total available combat strength … and a third of all the battle dragons deployed to this entire chain.

The long-term implications of that level of losses, especially in light of the Air Force's low total inventory of battle dragons, were something he resolutely refused to contemplate. Not yet. There would be time to think about that later, and he wasn't looking forward to it.

The short-term implications were something he couldn't avoid thinking about, however. His entire battle plan had been built around bringing the maximum possible weight of fire to bear on Fort Salby as quickly as possible. The yellows were supposed to have been the opening salvo, blanketing any exposed defenders in a lethal, saturating canopy of gas. Had they somehow missed their mark, their escorting reds had been supposed to sweep the fort's exposed interior with fireballs while the yellows looped back for a second pass. Now, with Hundred Helika's 5001st, Myr's weakest strike, detached to support Thousand Carthos' secondary advance, he had only the four shocked survivors of Geyrsof's 3012th-all of them blacks-and the six reds and four blacks of Commander of One Hundred Sahlis Desmar's

2029th Strike.

Part of his brain argued that he had to break off and pull back. That the losses he'd already taken were heavier than the conquest of one more Sharonian portal fort could possibly justify. But this wasn't just one more portal fort; it was the perfect forward defensive position Two Thousand Harshu had been looking for from the moment the Expeditionary Force began its advance. Besides, he wanted these people.

He didn't know why they'd put machine guns in such an unlikely spot. From test firings with captured weapons, Intelligence had determined the approximate range of the Sharonians' heavy automatic weapons, so he knew they had the reach from those positions to cover the railroad and road which connected the portal to the fort and its small, surrounding town. And he supposed that given the initial hostile contact between Arcana and the Sharonians, it would have made sense to devote at least a little attention to defending the approaches from the direction of Hell's Gate. But he also knew how heavy those large-caliber machine guns were, and getting them into position-or just keeping them supplied with ammunition and getting their gun crews up-and-down those mountainsides, for that matter, especially without dragons-must have been an unmitigated pain in the arse.

The elevation damned well gives them good command of the surrounding area, I suppose, Myr thought harshly. But why here and nowhere else?

Another possibility suggested itself to him, but that was ridiculous. If these people had had any idea an Arcanan invasion force was this close to Traisum, they would never have left those work crews and all of that heavy equipment exposed on Fort Mosanik's very doorstep! And even if they had known, how could they possibly have placed those weapons so perfectly? Given all of the possible lines of approach, how could they have picked exactly the right one to cover?

No way! He shook his helmeted head. However it happened, the bastards have to have just lucked out.

Well, his mouth twisted grimly, I suppose things have gone so well this far that it's about time we had a little bad luck, too. But these fuckers are not going to get away with massacring my people this way!

He used his helmet spellware to trigger the combination of a white and an amber flare, and one of Geyrsof's surviving blacks climbed obediently up to his level. The pilot looked over at him, and Myr used dragon-pilot hand signs to order the other dragon back to report to Thousand Toralk and Two Thousand Harshu.

The pilot nodded, and his beast banked away. Myr watched him go, then turned grimly back to the task at hand. No doubt Toralk and Harshu would have their own thoughts about his fiasco, and he wasn't exactly looking forward to hearing them. But by the time his superiors got around to sharing their impressions of his most recent operation with him, that fort was going to be a smoking, smoldering ruin.

Cerlohs Myr owed the First Provisional Talon-and the 3012th Strike-that much.

Company-Captain Mesaion stood tautly in his position, field glasses glued to his eyes, staring up into the early morning sky above Fort Salby.

Chief-Armsman Wesiar chan Forcal stood beside him, but unlike Mesaion, chan Forcal was parked under the very best overhead cover they could give him. The supporting structure above him was made of two crossed layers of railroad ties, thickly buttressed by sandbags. The western side of his personal bunker was the parapet of the fighting step itself, and the northern side was the equally solid adobe and stone of one of the gate bastions. The southern side was a wall of sandbags stacked two-wide at the top and four-wide at the bottom. In fact, only the eastern side was open, and that only so that he could communicate with Mesaion.

There was a reason for how elaborately the chief-armsman was protected while his superior was so exposed. Unlike Company-Captain Mesaion, Chief-Armsman chan Forcal didn't need field glasses as he stood there with his eyes tightly closed and his head cocked in an attitude of intense concentration. He was one of the most precious commodities any artillery commander could have; a highly trained, highly experienced predictive Distance Viewer.

"Coming in!" he announced suddenly. "Circling to the north, and climbing!"

Mesaion swung his glasses onto the indicated bearing and saw a swarm of distant black dots climbing in a tight corkscrew, wings laboring. Even with the glasses, he couldn't make out a great many details at that range, but he didn't really need to, either.

Sorry I ever doubted you, your Highness, the artillerist found himself thinking. Then he lowered the glasses.

"Keep your head down Wesiar," he said. "We can't have anything happening to it, now can we?"

He smiled tightly at the Distance Viewer, then turned his own head to look at the crews assigned to the pedestal guns and machine guns mounted atop the walls.

"Okay, boys! The Prince put you right where you need to be! And in just a minute, it's going to be time to show these bastards why!

Hundred Myr's lips skinned back as the 2029th reached its designated pushover altitude. He'd been right.

They might have placed outlying machine guns to cover the railroad and the ground approaches, but they hadn't bothered to put any of them out here in these barren, totally uninhabited mountains. Now, safely above the reach of their godsdamned weapons, he and his dragons headed out towards their objective.

Myr gazed down through Razorwing's vision, examining the fort they'd come to burn, and grimaced.

I shouldn't have argued against sending in the recon gryphons, he told himself bitterly. Obviously, they don't think of this thing as "just one more portal fort," do they? They must have a dozen of those machine guns up there on the walls.

His belly muscles tightened at the thought, but his fingers were sure and confident in the control grooves. Yes, they had a lot of firepower down there, and no one was going to dismiss the threat-not after what had happened to the 3012th. But this wasn't going to be broadside shots into unsuspecting beasts moving on steady, predictable courses. No. These defenders were going to have to fire directly upward, into the teeth of a dozen thirty or forty-ton battle dragons, flying straight at them and belching fire and lightning bolts as they came.

And that, my fine Sharonian friends, Myr thought savagely, is a very different dragon fight, indeed.

"Steady," Mesaion murmured to himself, far too low for any of his gunners to have heard.

"Steady … steady … steeeeeeady …"

The dragons were almost directly overhead now. Surely they would have to begin their attack dive soon.

The artillerist spared one precious moment to look over his shoulder to where Crown Prince Janaki stood on the gun platform beside Regiment-Captain chan Skrithik. The prince wasn't looking his way, which was a pity. Mesaion would have liked to have at least nodded to Janaki in appreciation.

The Yerthak pedestal gun was essentially a naval weapon which had been around for decades. In fact, it had slipped over into obsolescence these days, and it was being steadily phased out of naval service in favor of light quick-firing weapons, like the ship-mounted version of the field artillery's three-point-fourinch quick-firer, because its shells simply were no longer heavy enough for its original design function.

But it remained an effective weapon for many other purposes, and the decision to upgrade the Imperial Navy's tertiary armament meant that a largish number of Yerthaks which had become suddenly surplus to be Navy's needs were finding their way into Customs Service or PAAF use.

In many ways, it was similar to the Faraika, but instead of two to four barrels in a single, fixed sleeve, the Yerthak-depending upon its caliber-had from four to six barrels arranged to rotate around a central axis in a circular motion. Instead of belted ammunition, they fired rounds from huge clips, like oversized rifle magazines, with each barrel firing as it reached the highest point of its circular path. A

pedestal gun's sustained rate of fire was lower than that of the lighter Faraika, and it could maintain maximum-rate fire only briefly, but that was fine with Mesaion. Because, unlike the Faraika, the Yerthak was a genuine artillery piece.

The Yerthak Works had produced the weapon in several calibers. The most common were the one-pointfive- inch and two-point-five-inch versions. The two-point-five, like the ones on Fort Salby's walls, came with four barrels and had a muzzle velocity of almost sixteen hundred feet per second and a maximum range of just over six thousand yards with the new "smokeless powder" rounds. And, unlike the onepoint five-inch, it was capable of firing cannister rounds, not simply high-explosive or solid ammunition.

They had been intended for relatively short range actions, meant to smother light torpedo craft in a torrent of high-explosive. As such, their designed elevation was strictly limited. But thanks to Janaki's warning, the available guns were deployed in a wide ring and mounted on firing platforms wide enough to allow the weapons to be traversed through three hundred and sixty degrees. Elevation was still limited, but the Fort Salby machinsts had torched off the limiting stops on the elevation quadrants to squeeze several more degrees out of them. Coupled with the broad base of fire from the way they were spread out around the fort's perimeter, theyhad elevation enough to form a cone much taller than would normally have been the case, and Janaki and chan Skrithik had thoughtfully provided something to help fill the gaps and thicken their total weight of fire. Every Faraika II which hadn't been emplaced in the hillside positions for the opening ambush had been clamped atop improvised post mounts, as well, and they had considerably more elevation then the pedestal guns did.

Now the men behind those guns watched over their sights as an incredible freight train of flying impossibilities dove straight towards them.

A black's lightning bolt would be far less effective than one of the reds' fireballs. Myr knew that. But after the losses he'd already taken, they needed every dragon. Even if that hadn't been true, Myr was a dragon pilot himself before he was anything else. No one else was going to lead the strike-not after what had happened to the 3012th.

He felt Razorwing's determination in the way the big dragon folded his wings and fell into a headlong, screaming dive. Despite the losses he'd already suffered, despite the possibility that he was going to suffer still more of them, Cerlohs Myr had never felt more alive, more confident … more powerful and focused.

That's not a machine gun! he thought abruptly. There wasn't time to try to puzzle out just what "that" was, but the weapon was bigger and bulkier. And the Sharonians were aiming it upward, as well.

Bigger probably means nastier, his racing mind decided, and he moved his aimpoint from the machine gun he'd already picked out to one of the unknown weapons. He barely had time to make the change before the crosshair stopped blinking as Razorwing's longer ranged breath weapon entered its effective range of the new target.

"Kershai!" Myr shouted, and the arm-thick column of lightning streaked downward.

Company-Captain Mesaion flinched as the solid shaft of lightning exploded across the sky. It was almost blindingly bright, even in the full daylight which had now settled over Fort Salby, and the thunderclap as it struck home was quite literally deafening.

It didn't appear to have that broad a threat zone-probably a circle no more than eight or ten yards across

– but within that zone, it was lethal. It also appeared to be fiendishly accurate. It struck directly on top of one of his Yerthaks, and the gun crew didn't even have time to scream. They convulsed, smoke erupting from their clothing and hair, and then the ammunition in their weapon's magazine cooked off in an explosion that completely crippled the gun.

Mesaion saw it all, but only out of the corner of his eye, and there wasn't really time for it to register before his own people opened fire.

Myr saw the tracers streaking upward as Razorwing started to pull out of his screaming dive. The big dragon banked, twisting sideways, trading lift for evasion. It was a dangerous game to play this close to such mountainous terrain and at such low altitude after such a high-speed dive, but Razorwing was a skilled veteran, and the sheer adrenaline rush filled Myr with a wild sense of exultation. This-this-

was what he'd been born for!

Then Razorwing bucked, bellowing a hoarse scream, as his low-altitude flightpath carried him straight in front of one of the pedestal guns. The rotating barrels flamed, the muzzle blast slammed at the faces and clothing of everyone near it, bronze cartridge cases flicked out of the opening breeches, bouncing and rolling, and Razorwing took two direct hits.

The high-explosive rounds slammed into belly scales which wouldn't have stopped even the far lighter rounds of the machine guns. They penetrated deep, and then exploded.

Cerlohs Myr and his dragon slammed into the neat houses of the Salbyton at almost three hundred miles an hour.

Mesaion was never really able to sort it all out clearly later. It happened too quickly, too fast to be accurately recorded by the brains of the human beings caught in the chaos.

Machine guns and pedestal guns thundered and hammered insanely. The sky above Fort Salby was filled with stupendous creatures, and the gunners hurled their hate in copper-jacketed bolts and the sledgehammers of high-explosive.

The dragon pilots of Arcana had never experienced anything like it. For the first time, they encountered concentrated fire from a prepared, unshaken position, and the short range of their dragons' breath weapons left them no choice but to enter their enemies' reach.

Lightning bolts lanced downward. Only a handful of the shorter-ranged fireballs were successfully launched, and two of those went wide as defensive fire smashed into the firing reds. Sharonians screamed and died. The fireballs that landed inside the fort's confines exploded with tremendous force, and a tiny corner of Mesaion's mind thanked Prince Janaki fervently for insisting that his howitzer and mortar crews be kept under cover, out of their gun pits, until they were actually needed.

The overhead cover the prince had insisted with equal fanaticism upon providing for the riflemen spread out along the fort's fighting step proved its worth, as well. For all the heat and fury of the fireballs, they lacked the blast effect to penetrate those heaped sandbags.

What they did to Mesaion's exposed gunners, however, was something else entirely.

In less than two screaming minutes of savage action, fifty-three of Lorvam Mesaion's men were killed outright. Another eighteen were wounded so badly death would have been a mercy, and still another seventeen were put out of action. Four of his Yerthaks were destroyed or disabled. He lost five Faraikas, and two of his heavy mortars were thoroughly wrecked as all the ready ammunition in their-thankfully

– unmanned pit went up in a thunderous chain of explosions.

But while all that was happening, his gunners brought down eight more dragons.

One mortally wounded beast crashed directly into the top of the northwestern tower like a forty-ton hammer of scales, blood, and bone, and the impact reduced the pedestal gun crew atop that tower to gruel. The parapet exploded outward in a meteor storm of broken adobe, stones, and dust, and the dragon came to rest, one shattered wing drooping down until its tip trailed on the ground beyond. Its pilot dangled from its broken neck, hanging limp and broken himself from the straps of his flight harness. Another dragon smashed into the southernmost stretch of the western wall. It just missed the corner tower where the wall turned to angle back to the east, and the plunging beast crushed the firing step's improvised overhead protection. At least another thirty men were killed as the dragon exploded through the parapet and slammed to earth between the wall and the nearest gun emplacement.

Smoke billowed up from the fort's interior. The top of the southern tower might have been missed by the plummeting dragon, but it was enveloped in a holocaust all its own where that dragon's fireball had struck yet another of the Yerthaks before it was killed itself. The fireball had ignited the destroyed gun's ready-use ammunition, and two dozen neraby infantry had been killed or wounded. But only four of the attacking dragons managed to pull out of their dives successfully, and two of them staggered off, obviously badly hurt.