Authors: Adrian Tchaikovsky
‘Oh, clever,’ she acknowledged. The Denlander snipers were well outside of the defenders’ range. There was nothing for it but to wait and watch each light being snuffed
violently out by well-placed gunfire.
‘So much for that idea,’ she murmured to herself, and then, at the top of her lungs, ‘Everyone into positions: trench and wall! Stay in cover as much as you can but make sure
you can see to fire!’ All around her, men and women squatted down behind the barricade, resting their muskets atop it or poking them through holes between its sections. Before the barricade,
the trench party would similarly be hunkering down, taking aim. They had drawn the short straw: the first to take the brunt when the Denlanders finally plucked up the courage to attack.
‘What’ll it be?’ Mallen sloped up beside her. ‘Volleys at their range, or will they try and sneak up as close as they can?’
‘Or both. They’re probably asking themselves the same question.’ She glanced at him. ‘Your night vision must be good; your scouts’ too?’
‘Indeed.’
‘Get your people spread along the line. The sun’s almost down past the cliffs, and once it’s dark we’ll need all eyes to tell us when the enemy’s coming.’
Out there, the Denlanders were moving out from the swamps and forming into companies. She wondered how they had spent today, what oaths had been sworn, what hands clasped in friendship and
farewell.
The front lines, their ranks as broad as the entire camp, began moving forward in the gathering gloom, but stopping well out of range of the Lascanne guns. Emily strained her eyes, trying to
make out individual figures in that mass of shadowy grey.
‘Are they into two ranks?’ she asked and then, before Mallen could reply, yelled, ‘Brace! Brace for a volley!’
She ducked back behind the barricade, and the double rank of Denland guns opened up, almost in a single thunderclap of sound. She felt the wood of the barricade twitch under the impact, saw
splinters and dust showering up and all around. There were one or two screams, shots punching through the wood into the flesh, but even with their magic guns the Denlanders could not destroy the
barricade with just one round of fire – nor, Emily hoped, with many.
‘Stay down,’ she called. ‘They may try another.’ She peered out at the enemy again, despite her own best advice, and could barely distinguish them. Their uniforms blended
in with the all-pervading dusk, the gunsmoke and the wood dust, until she could barely make out even the great mass of them.
Beside her, Mallen let out a long breath. ‘Moving,’ he told her. ‘Moving in.’
Emily nodded. ‘Caxton, send a runner to Pordevere and Mallarkey. Let’s get two rounds at them as they come in. Let Mallen’s scouts call the first round, as close to long range
as they can.’
‘Yes, Lieutenant.’
Emily sat down, her back to the barricade. ‘Your call, Mallen.’
The master scout leant on the crate in front of him, shielding his eyes from the lantern light behind him. ‘Taking it slow. They want us to fire too soon.’
‘Then don’t let us fire too soon,’ she told him. She imagined the great mass of Denlanders inching forward, the men at the front sweating and terrified, waiting for an eruption
of firing from the fortifications. ‘How many, do you think?’ she asked.
‘Still coming out of the woods.’
‘Still?’
She felt Mallen tense beside her, put his musket butt to his shoulder. She scrambled up. The sun was fully eclipsed by the cliffs now, and she could see virtually nothing of the enemy. She could
only trust that Mallen’s better eyes were good enough.
‘Ready,’ the scout said softly, more to himself than her, then took his whistle between his teeth. He peered into the falling night. ‘Ready . . .’
She put her own musket up to the barricade, finger poised on the trigger, letting her entire being wait on Mallen’s signal.
Which came, with a high, clear blast and, an instant later, all down the line his scouts were giving the call to fire. Her finger twitched on the trigger; aiming was immaterial. The entire north
wall of the barricade became a fireworks display of musket fire, lighting up in a blaze of gunpowder and reeking smoke, as the soldiers of Lascanne riddled the night with lead balls.
And hit. Invisible in the night came the screams of injured and dying Denlanders, and Emily could only imagine what damage that concerted fire had done to their careful lines. Now came the
sporadic flashes and bangs of their return fire, and she knew that they would be running at speed across dark ground towards the camp, in a desperate gamble that they would get to the enemy in
time.
‘Reload!’ Emily shouted, feeling her voice grate hoarsely. ‘Reload! I want a second round before they get here. Reload!’ Her own hands were already going through the
drill: powder, ball, wadding, ramrod. How many times had she done this before, in practice or for real? Beside her, Mallen’s movements were as easy and automatic as her own.
In amidst the occasional shot from the running Denlanders, she could hear the drumming of their boots upon the ground. Close, getting closer.
She was now reloaded, and she had to assume that her men were as well. The Denlanders were just pale shadows in the camp’s lamplight. A musket shot splintered the crate beside her, as she
brought her gun up.
‘Ready!’ she called, hearing other officers yelling the same order all along the line. ‘Fire!’
At virtually point-blank range, the salvo of gunfire from the trench and the barricade stopped the Denlanders dead. Their entire front line was scythed down in a hail of shot and smoke, and in
the aftermath they were fleeing, running away, desperate to get out of range before the Lascanne soldiers could reload again.
She heard herself give out a great whoop of triumph, and saw some of her men start to move forward to fire again. ‘No, no! Stay behind the barricade!’ she bellowed at them, even as
shots started to fall amongst them, taking down half a dozen of the boldest.
‘Back! They’ll come again!’ she shouted. So much of war involved shouting at people.
‘They’re coming now,’ Mallen told her, squinting into the dark. ‘Skirmish order.’ Even as he said it, the shots started, scattered but regular, punching into the
barricade four or five at a time, and encouraging the Lascanne soldiers to keep their heads down.
‘Everyone reload, if you haven’t already,’ she called out. ‘Ready for another round.’
‘Now,’ Mallen said. Her voice echoed his whistle, giving the order to fire again and feeling her throat ache with it. The Lascanne soldiers put their guns to the barricade and
fired en masse, even as three or four of them were hit by the Denlander sharpshooters. She hoped these shots had done as much damage as the last, but the advancing Denlanders were coming in as a
staggered, scattered body, and she knew many of her soldiers’ shots would have passed between them. Again she was shouting for the reload, desperate for that second shot.
‘Going to be tight,’ Mallen observed. She tried to concentrate on her musket, but she was holding her breath, watching her men out of the corner of her eye as they primed their own
guns with shaking hands. The staccato rattle of the Denlander weapons was still sending splinters spraying all around and, even as she looked up, one incautious soldier was slammed back from the
barricade, clutching his shoulder. Another man grabbed him beneath the armpits and hauled him roughly away, which made him scream far more than the shot had.
Steady.
And, as she glanced towards Mallen, men along the line started firing, not in unison but piecemeal. ‘Hold!’ she called, but her men had caught the disease and their
shots speared into the Denlanders in twos and threes, killing individual men but letting the advance live. Emily cursed and fired her own shot as the ghostly shapes of the Denland men emerged out
of the night. Even as she fired, she saw flickers amongst them, then the sudden flare of shuttered lanterns opened at half a dozen points.
What in the world are they doing . . . ?
‘Get down!’ Mallen was shouting, but for once she did not heed him, for her attention was taken with the slow-spinning sparks that the Denlanders had hurled forward, whirling in
tight loops as they coursed in long arcs towards the trench and the wall. The lamplight caught one and she had a brief glimpse of something metal with a trailing, burning cord.
Then there was an explosion that she felt through her feet and something struck her an almighty blow, picked her up and lifted her off her feet, casting her to the ground behind Mallen. Her head
rang and for a moment she was seeing double. There were further explosions down the line, shattering crates and boxes to splinters and ripping into the men beside them.
‘Get up!’ Mallen urged her. He fired over the barricade and then dropped to reload, his hands moving swift and sure. She wasn’t sure that she could, just then. There was a
ragged cut across one arm, and her questing fingers found a dent in the side of her helm that must have been from a piece of one of those bombs.
Grenades!
she realized.
But we never use them.
She knew that they would never stay lit in the swamps.
But, of course, we are not in the swamps.
Mallen was aiming again, but something was terribly wrong now because his line of fire put his target inside the barricade. She hauled herself to her feet to see a ring of grey uniforms pouring
through a jagged rift in the defences, spreading into a tight semicircle and firing outwards, even as new men came in to help expand their stolen ground. She reached for her musket and fired it
from the ground, seeing the man she was aiming at pitch backwards, and two more take his place. She levered herself up, crying, ‘Hold them in! Hold them in!’ or trying to. The words
came out as a feeble croak. A soldier stepped between her and the Denlanders, aiming down the length of his gun, but was shot down before he could even fire. She lurched forward, snatched his
musket and loosed it herself, but such sporadic resistance was not keeping the Denlanders in. Their semicircle was expanding outwards as more of them flocked through the breach to fire and reload,
fire and reload, like machines.
‘Sabres! Sabres and clubs!’ she heard a high voice calling out, Marie Angelline at her best. ‘Close with them. Drive them out!’
Emily leant heavily against the barricade, feeling splinters jabbing through her jacket, making an effort of getting her sword from its scabbard. Somewhere down the line came a sustained
explosion that was of no Denlander’s making, but was the sorcery of Giles Scavian washing over the Denlanders even as they hazarded another breach. She would have prayed for him, except
resisting the advancing Denlanders now monopolized her prayers.
A handful of squads from Bear Sejant ran into the fire of the Denlanders and vaulted over their own casualties, swords and pikes and table legs upraised for the assault. The orderly formation of
Denlanders disintegrated, men ducking out of the way of the onslaught, and yet others moving in to confront it. Suddenly there were men in grey running towards Emily, and she got her sabre clear
with one final effort. She only hoped she had the strength to swing it.
The closest attacker went down before some anonymous Lascanne gunner. She lurched into the path of the next with a clumsy sweep of her blade that flashed past his face, bringing him up short in
shock. He fumbled for a knife, and she slapped him across the face with the flat of her sword on the backswing, and managed to punch him in the head with the hand-guard. He reeled back, clutching
at the wound, and she put all her strength into a thrust that took him in the stomach. His convulsing weight ripped the sword from her hands, but she grabbed his musket out of the air and fired it.
Magic
? It felt like any other gun she had ever held.
She reclaimed her sabre, messily, and another man was upon her in that instant, lashing out at her with his hatchet. He missed, and her parry went wild, and for a moment they traded blows with
the air before she stepped in, trying to use the sabre’s leaden weight to split his head on a down stroke.
He caught her wrist with his free hand, and she fell against him, almost mouth to mouth. His wide, panicking eyes were all she could see, as he brought the axe clumsily down across the back of
her helmet. Her world exploded in a shattering kaleidoscope of light and darkness and she fell to her knees, clutching her head, even as Mallen knifed her assailant, three stabs in and out,
delivered faster than she could follow.
It had been the weighted back of the enemy’s hatchet, not the blade, or she would be dead, but she staggered as she got to her feet, her concentration fragmented. The entire battleground
reeled and swam before her.
Time separated out into distinct slices, into distinct images. She lost the power to string them together into any coherent story.
She saw a Denlander soldier putting his gun to a Lascanne woman’s back and then firing, even as the same woman was triggering her own weapon at one of his comrades. Emily tried to run at
him, waving her sabre, but he was already gone so she swept up the dead woman’s musket and fired after him. The trigger clicked uselessly, the weapon already empty.
A Bear Sejant trooper swung a pike in great red-slinging arcs all about him, hacking down any Denlander within his reach. His face was splashed with blood, his mouth open in a scream that was
silent beneath the roar of shot and the howling of the injured. She saw the front of his jacket jerk as a musket ball ploughed into it, but he swung on, blind and raging.
She caught sight of Tubal sitting on a box beside the ruined barricade, sighting up on a Denlander like some country gentleman on his veranda, pot-shotting at birds over breakfast. She tried to
make her way over to him but a grey-coated soldier collided with her, falling over her in a tangle of limbs and spinning her sabre from her grasp. She felt his hand scrabble for her throat, but
hers found the hilt of his knife and she yanked it from its sheath and buried it in him. Tubal did not even notice her.
She was surrounded by musket smoke. Shots zipped past her as she lurched towards the wall of the Stag Rampant hut. She had her pistol in her hand and levelled it at the first grey uniform she
saw, but it clicked hollowly. When had she fired it?