City in the Sky (34 page)

“What about the Seventh?” Erik said quietly. “I sent messengers to both.”

“I don't know,” Ikeras said, pausing as the first groups of men turned the corner of the road. All across the square, hands went to blades and men stiffened, but slowly relaxed as they realized it was the Seventh.

“They made it,” Erik sighed. “Thank the Gods.”

He turned back to Ikeras to find the older man looking at him oddly. “You're going to have to take command, Erik,” Ikeras told him. “We can’t rely on the Regulars left to save the city. You don't have a choice. You
have
to.”

“We'll see,” Erik said. “Come with me, we need to find out who's in command.”

The closer Erik drew to the Seventh's men, however, the more he realized that while someone obviously
was
in command, they hadn't done a good job of it. The men had clumped together by unit, but it was obvious they'd done so on their own, and nobody had bothered to dress the ranks or try to organize the troops.

The officers, instead of being spread through the men, providing the leadership and organization the Seventh so clearly needed, were clumped together at the front of the battalion. Erik eyed that clump, then sighed and approached.

“Who is in charge here?” he asked.

A dark-haired and -skinned man, tall for an Aeradi at only an inch shorter than Erik, stepped forward. “I am,” he said bluntly, without even bothering to salute. “Lieutenant Jells Felsten.”

“I see,” Erik said calmly. He eyed the officers behind the man. All lieutenants. They were all junior lieutenants, too. And not a single one of them looked pleased with the man in front of them.

“As none of your senior officers survived, I'm going to add you to my own men,” Erik said quietly. “We'll pick up the Fifth on our way, but we're going to be operating as one consolidated force.”

“I don't think so,” Felsten replied haughtily. “The Seventh is mine, and I see no reason to give up command to a
boy
.”

Irritation flared through Erik's mind, but he controlled it. “
Lieutenant
Felsten, I am the senior officer here. I am assuming command.”

“I have ten
years
of seniority on you, you jumped up little prick,” Felsten snapped back.

Erik knew that if he didn't do
something
, Ikeras was going to kill the smarmy bastard where he stood, and he couldn't
afford
that, not now. This time, he didn't even bother to control his anger, allowing it to suffuse his voice and burn away the last of his uncertainty.

“Lieutenant Felsten,” he snapped. “We have one mission, and one objective. Do you know what that is?”

“I don't give a...” Felsten began to say, glaring at Erik in clear contempt.

“
Defend this city!
” Erik snarled, cutting off the fool's words. “I
will
fulfill that mission, Lieutenant. Your offended ego means less than nothing to me besides that mission. You
will
obey my orders, or I will kill you where you stand for insubordination in the face of the enemy. Do I make myself
clear
, Lieutenant?”

For a long moment, Felsten looked like he was going to continue, but then he dropped his gaze, and Militia Captain Erik
septon
Tarverro, Acting Major in command of the Third and Seventh Newport Militia Battalions, nodded sharply and turned back to the rest of the officers.

“As I was saying,” he said calmly, “we will move out as soon as possible to pick up the Fifth Militia. We will then proceed to the Square of the Gods.”

“The Square of the Gods?” one of Felsten's lieutenants queried.

“Yes,” Erik replied. “Where dragons can reach, we cannot hold,” he said bluntly. “We need to man the inner defenses – and I intend to detach troops from our battalions to be
certain
that they are manned. Once those defenses are manned, the Draconans will only be able to land troops, not bring dragons in for support. They will have no choice but to take the forts out on the ground, to allow their dragons clear access to the city. To do that, they have to take the Square of the Gods.”

“You're going to put us straight in the path of their
entire
army
!” Felsten snapped, a crack of whimper in his voice preventing it sounding as strong as he'd likely hoped.

Erik turned on the man coldly. “Yes. Because that is our duty, and the only way we can hold this city. Understood?!”

Ignoring the man, Erik turned to the other lieutenants. Each of them nodded in sequence. Finally, Erik returned their nods. “Gentlemen, we will move out as soon as possible. However, the Seventh is a mess. Therefore 'as soon as possible' will be as soon as your units are organized and ready to move. Get to it!”

Kolanis watched each wave of transport dragons come sweeping in to land on the edge of the city with satisfaction. The battle dragons swept patrols through the sky over the transports and the troops forming into their regiments.

His hand caressed Lalen's head spikes one last time and dismounted. A Claw lieutenant, with the crossed quill and sword of a staff officer, was waiting for him. The youth looked barely old enough to shave, but he snapped off a perfectly credible salute to the sky-major.

“Sky-Major Kolanis, sir?”

“That would be me son,” Kolanis replied. “At ease. Your message?”

“Sky-General Adaelis requests your presence at the command post immediately, sir!” the youth barked out, his eyes trained on a point six inches above and to the right of Kolanis's shoulder.

“Which is where?” the sky-major asked gently.

The youth flushed. “Follow me, sir,” he said quickly.

Despite his perhaps excessive formality, the youth wove his way through the chaos of the forming battle formation with ease, guiding Kolanis to a massive black dragon, Adaelis' own Kelt.

In the shadow of Kelt's massive bulk, a dozen clerks and as many junior officers had set up folding tables and spread out maps, bustling around the general like planets attendant on the sun. Flat crystals were neatly lined up on one set of tables, and Kolanis raised an eyebrow at them. He didn't know what they were, but he doubted Adaelis had brought them for decoration.

He didn't have much time to look around the impromptu command post, as the other Skyborne officers arrived at much the same time as he did, and all of them were brought to the general.

Adaelis was short for a Draconan, and pudgy for a soldier. Yet when he faced his hardbitten veteran officers, Kolanis and the others found themselves coming to attention automatically. The general eyed them for a moment, and then spoke.

“Gentlemen, well begun. Well begun indeed,” he complimented them. “But well begun is only half-done, and half-done is far too early to relax. It appears,” he continued, gesturing at a map of the city on the table before him, “that our agents in the city failed to reach the inner defenses. While our information suggests that these forts are only lightly armed and are almost completely unmanned in any case, they still represent a real and present threat to our force.”

With a jerk of his chin, Adaelis indicated the regiments forming up around them. “Our best guess is that, between militia, Regulars and the King's Wind Guard, we are outnumbered by almost three to two. While our men have been even more successful in eliminating the enemy's officers than we'd hoped, and it looks like the Regular regiments have clumped together nicely for us, that remain a significant force. We
must
have the ability to provide aerial support.”

Kolanis was a Draconan officer, a brave and valiant man sworn to the defense of his people. He hesitated not a second before stepping forward. “Sir, the Green of Third is prepared to assault the defenses in the name of Dracona!”

He was less than a second behind the rest of the officers, and Adaelis nodded gratefully at them. “Thank you gentlemen. You have reaffirmed my faith in our men and officers. I refuse, however, to send a single battalion – or even several battalions – to attack these defenses. The forts are weak but the losses would remain too heavy. You will all move, in a strike we will coordinate from here.”

“How?” Kolanis could not help but ask.

Adaelis gestured for one of his staff to bring him one of the flat crystals Kolanis had noticed. “These, gentlemen. Tablets. Once broken in half, what is written on one will appear on the other instantly.”

Kolanis whistled silently. Magical communication, something only water mages had ever managed before, and
theirs
was mind-to-mind.

The General raised a finger. “Be warned, the tablets are limited in both range and lifetime, otherwise we would have issued them before we left. They'll be active for barely an hour after they are broken.. Until then, however...” Adaelis trailed off.

He didn't need to finish the sentence. Twelve hungry grins finished it for him.

The Fifth, thankfully, hadn't given Erik any of the trouble the Seventh had. When he'd turned up and started issuing orders, even the officers present had been more than willing to obey. They were in complete disarray, with what had apparently been social cliques nearly dividing the unit without any outside influence.

Erik provided an outside influence senior to them all, and if that hadn't been enough, he'd brought nearly nine hundred armed men with him. If the Fifth's officers had defied him, he'd been willing to lock every single one of them in chains and put their sergeants in charge. He was running out of time.

Now he led the Fifth and the Third toward the Square of the Gods at a full march. He'd order them to double-time, but he
couldn't
– he needed these men fit and ready to engage in close action.

The Seventh, on the other hand, he'd sent on ahead with orders to
run
all the way to the inner defenses. The battalion had been the most intact of his three units, with almost five hundred men under arms, and five hundred men was the minimum Erik figured could man the defenses safely.

If they double-timed it all of the way there, Erik figured they'd make it in time to drive off the first major push. They'd be too exhausted to fight a close action, but they wouldn't
need
to, and enough of the guns and crys-bows would be pre-loaded and charged that they would have some time to get their breath back before having to reload the weapons.

With the Seventh gone, however, Erik only had eight and a half hundred men, and he'd had to send messengers to the Regulars and other militia battalions. There were too many Draconans in the city for him to feel comfortable sending men out in less than squads, so that pulled away another hundred and fifty men.

So it was with a mere seven hundred men that Erik entered the Square of the Gods, to discover he was too late. A Draconan force had already entered the Square, and was hot in the pursuit of what Erik presumed to be the Seventh.

He didn't have much time. He looked over at Ikeras and said quietly: “Archers and charge?”

“Only option,” the non-com replied, equally quietly, then grabbed the signaler marching next to him. The Aeraid raised his trumpet to his lips and blew a series of five notes, a specific signal.

The last note was buried in the noise as a quarter of the men in the Aeradi force simultaneously came to a halt and drew their bows.

The chain of command among the Red Dragon agents in the city had been all but nonexistent. What there had been of it had started to fragment when Brane had been murdered, and the losses after the attack began had shattered what was left of it.

There had been nobody to argue with Hendall taking command. At least, no-one had been willing to try. He'd taken as long as he dared to organize the force around the non-coms among the infiltrators and the handful of agents he had to serve as officers, but the force was still a scratch-built mess.

Scratch-built or not, it was the only force this deep into the city, and after the troopers he'd collected on his way to the Square of the Gods, it was six hundred trained and armed men. If they could take the Square, they should be able to prevent the Aeradi from manning the inner defenses.

Or so Hendall thought, anyway. Until he entered the Square, leading his troops from the front as Draconan tradition commanded, and spotted the Aeradi troops in the middle of it. They were moving fast and didn't look like they were stopping in the Square.

“They're headed for the forts,” Hendall snarled aloud, the venom in his voice startling those around him. All his efforts and it looked like he was going to fail
this
close to succeeding.

With a shake of his head, the Red Dragon drew his sword. They were
not
going to fail, not if he had anything to do with it. Fast the Aeradi may have been, but they were still Aeradi. They simply didn't have the legs to outrun his people.

“Take them!” he bellowed, pointing his sword at the Aeradi soldiers almost running out of the Square. With a rumbling growl, the entire Red Dragon force surged after them at a run.