Hell Hath No Fury (38 page)

Sunlord Markan's decision to personally lead the one company they'd retained as an immediate reserve struck Garsal as quixotic, at the very least. Nonetheless, he'd obeyed the sunlord's orders and his Flicker had sent out the orders that stripped an entire battalion out of its positions and sent them thudding across the barren, dusty earth in Markan's wake.

Which left Garsal to deal with the minor matter of what looked like at least two or three hundred dragons headed straight for him.

And they're the diversion, are they?

The thought flashed through his brain, and for the first time in his life, he found himself devoutly hoping all the tall tales and legends about the Calirath Talent were actually accurate. Because, if they weren't … .

He watched them coming on, and as he did, another thought occurred to him.

They may be supposed to be a diversion. In fact, I'll bet they are. They'd have followed closer behind those eagle-lions if this were a serious attack. But it looks like they may not have realized just how long ranged our artillery really is.

His smile was thin and feral as the huge dragons swooped and wove their intricate patterns. There was an awful lot of motion up there, but they weren't actually advancing all that quickly, and he looked at his Flicker once again.

"Message to the artillery. Prepare to load with shrapnel … but don't set the fuses until I give the order to fire."

Five Hundred Urlan's lead dragoons reached the foot of the fortress wall. The rear troopers leaned back, triggering their cutdown infantry-dragons, sending blasts of intolerable heat rolling up the outer face of the wall. A Sharonian who'd leaned out to fire down upon them shrieked horribly and plunged from the parapet, trailing fire like a human meteor. Others ducked back, cowering away from the searing fury.

But still others had been waiting.

Urlan saw the small objects plunging down from above, and his stomach tightened. He didn't know what the godsdamned things were, but he was certain he was about to find out.

Chan Braikal heard the hand grenades exploding even through the thunder of the rest of the battle, and his eyes glittered with cold satisfaction as he listened to the screams from below. The bastards were too close to the wall for the artillery to drop on them any longer, but chan Yaran's grenades were obviously a different matter. Yet even as they exploded, the blasts of heat and fury continued to roar up from below, as well.

He looked out across the parapet, wondering if he had any eyebrows left, and swore with fresh inventiveness as he saw the floating … whatever-the-hell-they-were. He didn't know what to call them.

They looked for all the world like some sort of airborne boats, towed by the massive horses to which they were tethered. But whatever they were, they floated even higher than Fort Salby's walls, and they were packed to the gunwales with Arcanans, some of whom obviously had fire-throwers of their own.

His men had the advantage of better cover, the fort's adobe had already proven itself virtually immune to the blast effect of the Arcanan fireballs, and the mortars could still reach the tow horses. Unfortunately, chan Braikal and the other defenders on the wall were also outnumbered by somewhere around ten-toone, and when one of the fireballs did find a chink in the parapet, it killed or wounded four or five of his people at once.

Chan Yaran and his squad were still chucking hand grenades over the edge as quickly as they could pull the pins, and chan Braikal had another squad doing nothing but protect the grenadiers. Which left him only three squads-less than thirty men, with the casualties he'd already taken-to hold off at least eight or nine hundred Arcanans in those floating boats.

It was not a winning proposition, even for Imperial Ternathian Marines.

Five Hundred Urlan grimaced in satisfaction as Charlie Company finally came up with the infantry assault force.

His two lead companies had taken at least thirty percent casualties, but they'd also managed to suppress a lot of the defensive fire. Now Kiliron's troopers had managed-not without taking serious losses of their own-to get close enough they were sheltered from the Sharonians' artillery fire by the wall itself, and that meant the infantry could damned well take over!

Chan Braikal felt someone pounding on his shoulder. He turned his head and found himself looking into Platoon-Captain Tarkel chan Noth's blue eyes.

"How bad, Chief?!" chan Noth shouted in the Marine's ear, pointing downward to indicate the ground at the foot of the wall.

"I think we've got the first batch of bastards pinned-sort of, at least!" chan Braikal shouted back, then pointed out at the approaching "air boats." More and more fire was beginning to come from them, and chan Noth ducked as a fireball exploded just below the edge of the parapet directly in front of him.

"But if we don't stop that, Sir, we're fucked!" chan Braikal added … quite unnecessarily, he was certain.

"Then it's a good thing I brought this!"

Chan Braikal turned his head and saw a three-gun section of Faraika I machine guns setting up with frantic haste.

"Mother Jambakol!" Urlan snarled again as the distinctive, ripping-cloth sound of one of the Sharonians accursed "machine guns" crackled above him. He whipped his head around in time to see splinters flying from two of the closer personnel pods as the Sharonians flayed them with fire. Then, suddenly, one of them plunged to shatter on the ground below as one of the Sharonian bullets either killed the Gifted engineer controlling the levitation spell or smashed the acumulater itself.

A second pod followed moments later, and the cavalry commander looked around quickly, then grunted as his eyes found what they'd been looking for.

"Fifty Rahndar!"

The dark-haired commander of fifty with the Engineers shoulder patch looked around sharply at the sound of his name.

"Yes, Sir!"

"I want a godsdamned hole, Fifty," Urlan snarled, jabbing a finger at the fort wall, "and I want it right fucking now!"

Rahndar darted a quick, anxious glance up the wall to where those infernal explosive devices were plunging down and swallowed hard. Apparently, however, the thought of being blown apart was less daunting than whatever he'd just seen in Urlan's eyes.

"Yes, Sir!"

Rahndar reined his horse around and started shouting for the rest of his engineering section.

Chan Braikal was just beginning to feel a certain cautious optimism when the world went crazy.

It wasn't really an explosion. It was too … quiet for that. There was no flash, no thunder, just the sudden concussive shattering of adobe and stone. It should have sounded like an explosion, but it actually sounded more like a frozen tree trunk snapping in an icy winter night.

But whatever it sounded like, the force of it shook Fort Salby to its bones. A section of wall at least eight feet across at the base simply disintegrated. It flew apart, spraying adobe, rock, and men as it opened a wedge-shaped gap which ran all the way to the parapet and measured better than forty feet across at the top.

Two of chan Noth's machine guns went with it … and so did Petty-Armsman chan Yaran and his grenadiers. Half of chan Braikal's platoon was simply gone, and the survivors were shocked, stunned by the sudden cataclysm.

Chan Noth's men had been hit less severely, but they'd also still been in the act of taking up their positions. Confusion swept through them, however briefly, and the defenders' fire faltered.

"Now!" Gyras Urlan bellowed as the fire from above slackened. "Now! Go-go, godsdamn it!"

Young Rahndar had done his job well. In fact, he'd done it too well for his own good. He and most of his section-and another twenty or so of Urlan's troopers-had been caught in the collapse his demolition spell had wreaked. That was unfortunate, but no one could control where the wreckage from a demo spell was going to fall, and at least they had a breach at last.

Half of Urlan's surviving men flung themselves off their horses. They took their swords, their infantrydragons, and their daggerstones with them and charged forward, swarming up over the wreckage, into the clouds of billowing dust and smoke, with the high, howling cheer of the Seventh Zydors.

Lorash chan Braikal stared down into the gap which had suddenly appeared and shook himself. Despite its width, it was choked with rubble that roase to at least a third of the wall's original height.

Unfortunately, enough of that rubble had spilled outward to provide a ramp, and he saw Arcanans in cavalry boots, breastplates, and helmets swarming up it. At least half of them seemed to be carrying the glittering tubes of their fire-throwers, and he snarled in fury.

He jerked the pin out of his final hand grenade and tossed it down into the gap, only to see it lodge in a hollow in the rubble before it exploded. The pocket into which it had fallen absorbed most of its power and only three or four men went down. The others kept coming, and a fireball roared past his ear.

Chan Braikal fired his rifle again and again, until the magazine was empty. He groped for another, but his hand came up empty. He cursed venomously, then kicked his feet over the edge of the gap and went slithering down into the dust and smoke, bayonet-first.

Five Hundred Urlan looked for his bugler, but the man was down with half his head blown away, and without the bugle, there was no way for him to communicate orders to Charlie Company. It should have already been here, and Urlan wanted to curse its commander as a coward. But that would have been unfair, and he knew it. Orkal Kiliron was no coward, but he was aware how valuable the Gifted engineers in his towed pods were. Although the fire from the wall directly in front of Urlan had been largely silenced, more and more rifle and light machine-gun fire was ripping out from the flanks. The smoke and dust hanging in the air was obviously affecting its accuracy, but at least two more pods had gone down, taking their infantry and engineers with them. If he'd been Kiliron, he probably would have assumed the defenders weren't being successfully suppressed and started falling back, too.

The five hundred reached out and grabbed the nearest trooper who was still mounted. The man's head whipped around.

"Sir?" His surprise was obvious, and Urlan shook him.

"Get your ass back there! Find Hundred Kiliron and tell him we need those pods up here right fucking now!"

Chan Braikal hit the bottom of the breach. His boots slipped and slithered in the ankle-deep rubble, and he found himself face-to-face with an Arcanan cavalry trooper.

The Arcanan reared back in obvious surprise, then swung his hand around. There was something in it.

Chan Braikal didn't have a clue what it was, but given the things these people had already done, he didn't intend to sit there and find out the hard way. The other man was still trying to bring whatever-it-was to bear when a fourteen-inch, tempered steel bayonet slammed forward above his protective cuirass and opened his throat.

Chan Braikal drove a combat boot into the dead man's breastplate, wrenched the blade free, and whirled to a second enemy.

More Sharonians hurled themselves forward. There was no unit organization to it. The breaching spell had buried at least sixty men inside the fort. Another forty or fifty had come down with the collapsing parapet. The platoons closest to it had taken the worst casualties, and some of those who weren't physically wounded were too stunned, too shaken, to respond coherently.

But others were like Lorash chan Braikal. They waited for no orders, didn't worry about where the rest of their platoon, or even the rest of their squad, might be. They drove forward to meet the charging Arcanans with rifles, pistols, shotguns, bayonets, rocks, or even their bare hands.

It was hand-to-hand in the breach.

Urlan could hardly believe the ferocity of the defense. The normal range advantage of the Sharonians'

rifles was meaningless here. His troopers' infantry-dragons and daggerstones were far more lethal than firearms in such narrow confines … or would have been, if there'd been room to use them. But the Sharonians were charging straight into them, too close for them to use even daggerstones without killing themselves, as well as their enemies. Infantry-dragon gunners were being forced to discard their weapons and whip out sabers to defend themselves against lunatics with knives on the ends of their rifles. And unlike his men's daggerstones, the Sharonians with pistols didn't have to worry about back blast killing them.

They were actually pushing his men out of the breach when a sudden rush of infantry surged past him.

He looked around and realized Kiliron had given up on getting the pods in across the top of the wall.

He'd grounded them, instead-or some of them, at least-and sent the infantry in at ground level.

"Yes!" Urlan bellowed as the fresh weight of men and weapons hammered the Sharonians back. "Yes!"

Chan Braikal staggered backward.

The cavalrymen had been falling back at last, but now men in infantry boots and equipment harnesses were charging forward. The ragged, disordered knots of Sharonians resisted stubbornly, but the Arcanan infantry were much better at this sort of game than their cavalry compatriots. They came forward with intact unit organization, and this time they were able to maintain enough separation to actually use their spell-powered weapons.

Blasts of flame and lightning swept the gap, maiming and incinerating, and chan Braikal flung himself down as an infantryman swung a daggerstone in his direction. His last-minute dodge saved him from a direct hit, but the very fringe of the bolt crashed over him. It slammed him into the rubble and broken adobe, and he slithered down it, alive but unconscious.

Five Hundred Urlan watched the infantry flowing unstoppably into the gap and groped in his saddlebag for the flare stone. He raised it and triggered the single green flare to announce his men's success.

Fifty Fahrlo saw the brilliant green flare arc up from the far side of the beleaguered fort.

He'd expected to see it sooner, but later was definitely better than never in this case. He looked over his shoulder to make certain the transport dragon who'd been told off to play messenger was already headed back towards the portal with the good news, then turned his attention back to the task at hand.