The Guns of Empire (25 page)

“Sir,” Fitz said, sighting Marcus. “I'm afraid the Third Regiment was repulsed.”

“I was watching,” Marcus said. “The rest are ready to go?”

“Yes, sir. On your order.”

“What about the artillery?”

Fitz looked at Viera, who glowered up at Marcus.

“We're ready,” she said. “But those siege guns outrange ours, and they've got the advantage of height. If we move up we're going to get pounded before we get into range.”

“There do seem to be more defenders than anticipated,” Fitz said. “At least six heavy guns on the walls, plus perhaps a battalion of infantry. Colonel Morag reports encountering extremely heavy fire.”

“Then we haven't got any choice but to use everything we've got,” Marcus
said. “Captain Galiel, move your batteries into range and open fire. Concentrate on the embrasures—if you can knock out even a few of those guns, it'll be a big help.”

Viera stared at him for a long moment. Marcus could read what was going through her mind as clearly as if it were printed on her skull. His order meant that some men—
her
men—would die. He could see her realize it, realize that
he
knew it, too, and that he was giving the order anyway. He remembered being on the other side of the exchange, when Janus had first come to Khandar.
You get used to it, if you stay in command. And what an awful thing
that
is.

“Yes, sir,” Viera said finally. She offered a stiff salute and turned away, already shouting orders at her lieutenants. Before long the teams were harnessed and put in motion, and the guns moved up, threading their way around the waiting ranks of infantry and across the grassy slope in front of the fortress with a surprising turn of speed.

It didn't take the fortress gunners long to notice the new targets. A gun team was harder to hit than an infantry column, but they gave it their all, fountains of dirt exploding all around the batteries. One lucky shot bounced a cannonball right through the team of horses pulling one of the six-pounders, leaving a trail of broken men and animals in its wake. The cannon slowed to a halt, what was left of its crew running to catch up with the others.

Marcus forced himself to look away. “Once she starts firing,” he told Fitz, “get the columns moving. Double-time to fifty yards, then charge. No shooting. Make sure every man knows our best chance is to get over the walls and give them cold steel. Got it?”

“Yes, sir,” Fitz said. Then, uncharacteristically, he hesitated. “Are you sure, sir? We don't have the numbers to be certain, and casualties will be high either way. Perhaps—”

“We don't have a choice,” Marcus said. “Janus wants that fortress, and he wants it fast. We have to give it to him.”

“Yes, sir,” Fitz said. “Of course.”

He turned his horse and went to find his staff captains. Marcus beckoned to Andy, who took a few moments to convince her horse to move. She was a city girl through and through and was, if anything, a worse rider than Marcus, though she didn't share his distaste for the animals.

“Find someone to watch my horse,” he said. “I'm going on foot from here.”

“Right, sir. I'll find someone to look after mine as well.”

Marcus sighed. “I don't suppose I can convince you to stay behind.”

“No more than I can convince you not to go,” Andy said. “Janus will be irritated if you get yourself killed, you know. And you'll break the queen's heart.”

“Would you stop that?” Marcus shook his head. “We're only going to get one chance at this. I'm not going to stand back and watch.”

“Then I'll be right alongside you, sir.”

There was no stopping her, so Marcus gave in with bad grace. They dismounted together and handed their horses to a cavalryman, then jogged over to the First Regiment, where Fitz was giving final instructions to the colonel.

“Ready on your command, sir!” Fitz said.

Marcus shaded his eyes and looked upslope. Viera's guns were in action now, flashing and roaring in a dense cloud of smoke. Sprays of brick erupted from the fortress walls whenever they scored a hit, but as far as Marcus could tell, all six of the big guns were still in action.
At least she's drawing their attention.
In a prolonged shooting match, the lighter field-guns would be annihilated.
We have to get on with it.

“All right,” Marcus said. “General advance, on the double! Fix bayonets! I want us over those walls!”

He raised his voice, and the soldiers who could hear him broke out in cheers that spread through the ranks. Six thousand men drew their bayonets from their sheaths, fixed them to musket lugs, and waited. A moment later the drums began, beating a quick double pace, and the battalions started forward. The first company of each carried a pair of flags, one bearing the number of the unit, the other the silver on blue of Vordan, and they rippled out in the wake of the men.

“You intend to join the advance, sir?” Fitz said, getting down off his horse.

“It's the only place I'll do any good,” Marcus said.

Once the last company of each battalion had passed, Marcus led Fitz and Andy forward. He felt himself falling into the familiar rhythm of the double step, almost automatically—he hadn't marched in the ranks in years, but the War College had etched the sound of the drums into his bones. Andy scrambled to keep up.

More cheers rose from Viera's cannoneers as the infantry passed them, and the firing redoubled. At least one gun was wrecked, its big wooden wheels shattered, and dead horses lay everywhere. Casualties from the initial advance started to appear, some lying still, others thrashing and waving in an effort to attract their comrades' attention. Marcus heard sergeants barking orders to ignore the wounded
whenever some kindhearted soul threatened to break ranks. The drums beat on, relentless.

The fortress guns turned back to the infantry, and the cannonballs began to fall around them, slamming into the earth with great sprays of dirt and bouncing back into the air at unpredictable angles. Wherever one sliced through the neatly ordered ranks, it yanked men down, snatching them out of the line like a giant's hand one, two, three at a time. “Close up, close up!,” the sergeant's eternal mantra, rose over the advancing men, competing in volume with the screams of the stricken.

Marcus marched on, fighting the instinctive urge to hunch forward as though walking into a rainstorm. Head down or head high, it would make no difference if a ball came right to him, and the thought was a little comforting. He looked over his shoulder and found Andy lagging behind, her steps faltering; her eyes were fixed on the ground, which was littered with the dead from the previous attack as well as their own. She almost tripped over the outstretched arm of a man who'd had most of his chest blown away, his blank eyes and curled fingers pleading.

This was not the kind of fight she was used to, Marcus realized. Andy had proved her toughness in the streets of Vordan, but it was a brawler's toughness, the courage to face a thug in a dark alley and the willpower to keep fighting until you came out on top. This was different—death came from the sky, at random, like some ancient god hurling bolts of lightning, with no stopping it or turning it aside.

Marcus grabbed her arm and pulled her forward, past the corpse. She looked at him, eyes wide, and he leaned close enough to shout in her ear.

“Don't look down!” he said. “Don't look back! Keep your eye on the flags!” The endcaps of the flagpoles flashed silver, even through the smoke, and the Vordanai eagle snapped and rippled. “One step after another!”

Andy swallowed, blinked rapidly, and nodded, picking up the rhythm of the drum again. She stayed at his side as the fire from their own guns warred with the fire ahead, turning the world into a single mass of noise and billowing powder smoke. The timbre of the fortress guns changed as they switched to canister, loads of balls spraying across the lines with every bellow and belch of smoke. The companies were shrinking, contracting toward their centers as sergeants and corporals closed the files and men continued to drop.

Then the defenders' muskets opened up, with a volley that spread along the wall like fire racing across paper. A new fogbank rippled out, puffing lazily over
the slope of the wall and the grass beyond. Balls zipped overhead and
thok
ed into the earth, or found purchase in flesh and sent soldiers reeling or stumbling or falling to their knees. The front companies, naturally, got the worst of it, but a man not twenty feet in front of Marcus stumbled out of line, clutching vainly at the ruin a wild shot had made of half his face.

Marcus drew his sword. “Sound the charge!”

“Charge!” Fitz shouted, his still-boyish voice hoarse.

The drums thrilled, quickening to the charge pace, heartbeat-fast. A roar rose from the Vordanai ranks, and they broke into a run, formations dissolving in the rush to close with the enemy. Cannons spat more canister, carving swaths through the soldiers, and Marcus found himself leaping bodies and dodging collapsing men as he came forward. Fitz was on one side of him, Andy on the other, but beyond that there was only swirling smoke.

“With me!” he shouted, his own voice cracking. “Over the wall! With me!”

He thought he heard answering shouts, but he couldn't be certain through the ringing in his ears. They pounded through grimy shadow for longer than seemed possible.
There wasn't
that
far to go—could I have gotten turned around?—
and then he could see the wall up ahead, a long, sloped brick surface with a shallow ditch in front of it. Once the ditch might have been sheer-sided and filled with stakes, but erosion and neglect had turned it into little more than a dip in the ground. Marcus leapt across, landed on the brick, and scrabbled a moment for balance. He turned, looking for Andy, only to find her missing.

Fitz was there, scrambling up the bricks on his other side. Marcus stared back into the smoke in vain, then screamed a curse at the top of his lungs and ran up the brick slope. Muskets were still going off all around him, deafeningly loud, the flashes like near-constant lightning. Directly ahead of him were two soldiers in Murnskai uniforms, white jackets over gray trousers, with heavy beards and tall, square-topped hats. They fell back a pace as he reached the lip of the wall and vaulted onto the fire step, swinging his sword in a downward cut that opened one of the enemy from shoulder to breastbone. The other dropped his musket and clawed for a weapon at his side, but Fitz was on him at once, running him through the stomach. He slid off the sword, groaning. Marcus realized the sound of musketry was fading, replaced by the clash of steel and the screams of dying men.

“What happened to Andy?” he shouted at Fitz. “Did you see?”

Fitz shook his head, then gestured with his sword. “We have to get to the water battery before they start spiking the guns!”

He was right, of course.
That's the mission Janus gave us.
More blue-uniformed shapes were looming out of the smoke, men with bloody bayonets, chasing their opponents off the wall and deeper into the fortress. Marcus waved his saber over his head to attract their attention and raised his ragged voice again.

“To the battery! With me!”

—

It was more than an hour before the fighting ended altogether. Once the assault got over the walls, the outcome was never in doubt, but many of the Murnskai stubbornly refused to surrender. There were a hundred last stands in courtyards and corridors, each exacting its toll in blood from the attackers.

Fortunately, this instinct for last-ditch defense meant that only at the final moment did any of the garrison think to start destroying the weapons they were supposed to be guarding, and by then it was too late. Fitz's men had fought their way into the water battery and held it against a desperate counterattack. Bskor was captured almost intact, save for where Viera's guns had pitted the outer walls.

But the cost had been fearful. Compared with seven hundred defenders killed or captured, the First Division had more than twice that many dead or wounded, littering the slope or sprawled in the ditches and courtyards of the fortress. Telling which was which would take some time, too, as teams worked to gather the corpses, triage the wounded, and drag those who needed it to the cutters.

Marcus was standing atop the riverside wall when they brought Andy to him. She had one arm thrown across the shoulders of a burly corporal, and one of her legs was wrapped in a layer of bandage. She managed a salute, however, and a broad grin.

“Sorry about that, sir,” she said. “Didn't mean to let you get ahead of me.”

Marcus smiled back, resisting an unsoldierly urge to hug her. “I'll allow it, Captain. But only this once.” He glanced at her leg. “Are you going to be all right?”

“Cutter says I was lucky. Nice clean puncture, missed the bone. Unless it festers, I should be fine.”

“That's good to hear.” Marcus let out a long breath. “Corporal, would you escort the captain to the officer's quarters? Let her use one of the beds there.” While the barracks for the rankers was cramped and unpleasant, the large building the Murnskai officers had used was more like a country manor than a military installation. Squads of Vordanai soldiers were prowling the halls now, seizing knickknacks and cutlery as souvenirs.

Viera, wearing a bloody bandage around her scalp and her usual scowl, arrived soon after Andy had limped away. Teams of her cannoneers took stock of the big guns aimed at the river and hauled ammunition and powder from the underground armory. It wasn't long before they had their first targets—a quartet of slow-moving river barges rowing upstream laden with food and supplies for the Murnskai army.

Marcus turned to Fitz. “Would you like to do the honors?”

Fitz smiled. “Warning shots, Captain Galiel. Ready. Fire!”

The huge naval guns roared. Enormous fountains of water rose from the calm river, bracketing the barges. As froth rained down all around the startled sailors, a ranker Fitz had chosen for his carrying voice climbed up onto the wall and began to shout in Murnskai. Marcus guessed their hasty translation wasn't perfect, but the men on the river got the idea. Slowly, the barges changed course, angling in toward the docks below the fortress.