Treachery's Tools (72 page)

Abruptly, at the sound of a horn, rifle shots rang out from in front of the defenders' earthworks. The sound suggested to Alastar that the attackers were still perhaps twenty yards or more back from the lower revetments.

“Imagers! Twenty yards beyond the revetments! Red pepper fog!”

Alastar watched, but saw nothing. Even though he'd expected that, it was still slightly unnerving. At the very least, he hoped, the pepper should make it harder for the attackers to see and to aim accurately … and, as if to validate that thought, the volume of shots slackened somewhat.

Then troopers wearing the black and crimson armbands and carrying rifles with knives fastened to them—bayonets—appeared, running toward the revetments. Immediately the defenders opened fire. Attackers began to drop, initially almost as they appeared, but there were more attackers appearing than being shot.

Alastar had ordered the imagers to hold off using wooden darts except in places where it appeared the attackers would overwhelm the second line of revetments. But it was still hard to watch when an attacker bayoneted a defender who was overcome by more attackers than he could shoot at.

The muted thunder of hoofbeats behind the imagers grew as a company of mounted troopers rode forward and past the imagers and down over the low revetments and into the mass of attackers, forcing many of them back or killing them outright.

At least a squad of the riders kept going, cutting through the foot with their sabers … and then disappearing. Two or three riders, or maybe it might have been more, kept coming in and out of sight as they wheeled their mounts to deal with attackers on the other side of the concealment and unseen by Alastar.

One rider went down, clearly shot by an attacker inside the concealment, and then another. Even so, the combination of troopers firing from behind the low revetments and the mounted company seemed to have blunted the attack.

A set of horn doublets came from the west, and the remaining attackers turned and sprinted back into the cover of the concealment. Five, then another five mounted troopers rode uphill out of the concealment, and joined the rest of the company in withdrawing.

A last rider, moving to join them, shouted, “Wagon-turtle! There's a wagon-turtle!” Then he slumped forward in the saddle, shot from behind.

A wagon-turtle?
Alastar had no idea what that was, unless it referred to the wagon he'd seen earlier and the fact that it was armored somehow, although he only recalled seeing armor on the front of the wagon.

In what seemed like moments, there was no sign of any attackers, except for the fallen, and there looked to be at least a hundred. Alastar surveyed the double line of revetments, going from the north all the way to those on the south that ran all the way up to the river road, but there were no attackers.

Without any warning, and no horn signals, a massive wave of attackers appeared, charging out of the concealment toward the revetments. Then a company of mounted rebels charged from out of nowhere, heading toward the northeast end of the defenders' lines, clearly aiming to open a passage to the river road … and L'Excelsis. They weren't within a hundred yards when Fifth Company appeared in force, slamming into the rebels, halting the attack, and turning the northern end of the battlefield into a confused mass of men, mounts, and blades.

Alastar couldn't afford to watch the mounted conflict, especially since the troopers manning the revetments were clearly outnumbered.

“Imagers! Use your darts! Now!”

Attackers began to fall, one after the other, but the survivors still pressed forward, if slowly. Then another company of foot charged past the imagers, sabers in hand, and began to cut into the advance, pushing the attackers back.

“Imagers! Hold your fire!” Having no doubts that the second wave of attackers was far from the last, Alastar wanted to save the imagers as much as possible. While still watching the melee less than fifty yards away, he took out his water bottle and took a long swallow … and then a second.

Another set of horn doublet echoed across the battlefield, and in moments, the surviving attackers had retreated back into the concealment. Alastar glanced back to the north where the remaining attacking horsemen were breaking off the fight.

He caught a glimpse of Julyan, the youngest of the maitres in the imager force, looking westward, seemingly trying to see past the conflict and into the concealment that hid all too many of the attackers. Behind Julyan and spaced midway between him and Dylert was Cyran, looking as calm and self-possessed as he always did.

Perhaps not the most far-seeing senior imager, but certainly solid. Definitely solid, if slightly prone to wanting to please too much.

At that moment, a very small spear, actually a projectile resembling an ancient crossbow quarrel, slammed into the chest of a trooper who had turned to withdraw with the rest of Fifth Company.

A quarrel?
Alastar froze for a moment.
A frigging quarrel?
That meant at least some imagers from Westisle had thrown in with the rebels, most likely Voltyrn and those he could convince. Alastar could only hope it wasn't the entire Westisle Collegium.
If you'd named him Maitre there …
Alastar shook his head.
You can't deal with that now … but you can't not deal with it … or at least not find out.
And since there wasn't nearly the risk of cannon or massed heavy rifle fire centered on him or the other imagers.…

Alastar looked right to Seliora, posted now slightly less than ten yards to the north, and then to his left, where Arion was stationed. “Arion! Seliora! Close on me! Now!”

Once the two flanked him, he said, “We're headed into the concealment, carrying our own concealment. There's at least one imager from Westisle with the rebels.”

“How—” Arion broke off his question.

“They don't use darts. They use something like a small crossbow quarrel. Fifth Company just lost some troopers to quarrels. We need to do something before they commence another attack.” He urged the gray forward at a fast walk. There would be time enough to hurry once they were inside the rebel concealment … when whatever they were dealing with was done.

The way to the concealment wasn't exactly straight, not with the horses having to wind around bodies, but when they were inside the concealment was obvious, for two reasons. First, there were only a few bodies lying in the trampled grass, and second, Alastar could see the rebel troopers re-forming—all of them, a force that looked more like four regiments than the two that the rebels were supposed to have. And that force was advancing, although it was more than three hundred yards away.

Alastar did his best to fix the relative positions of the various units in his mind, then turned his attention to the “wagon-turtle,” less than a hundred yards away. The wagon did indeed resemble a giant shelled creature, with the plates of the shell being iron shields that fitted together.

“Your strongest shields,” he said quietly, before imaging his equivalent of a cannon shell inside the wagon.

The explosion that followed was strangely muffled, but the upper shield “plates” of the turtle flew both outward and in some instances upward, and a cloud of white smoke wreathed what remained of the wagon. Alastar felt shaken by the impact on his shields, but not as much as he had expected.
The Westisle imagers' shields blocked some of the force.

He could only hope that the explosion had killed or at least stunned the imagers who had created and maintained the concealment, but there was no way to tell that yet, because he and Seliora and Arion remained within the area the concealment had covered.

“Back to our revetments.” He turned the gray.

Arion and Seliora kept pace.

As soon as the gray carried him back across where he thought the concealment had been, he glanced back over his shoulder … and smiled, if only momentarily, as he saw the entire rebel force moving toward them. “Back into position. Maintain shields and concealments.”

The advancing rebel troopers, carrying their bayoneted heavy rifles, just walked steadily toward the defenders. At that point, Wilkorn's cannon began to fire. Many of the shots missed, but Alastar did see an entire squad wiped out.
Grapeshot!

Despite the occasional devastating effect of the cannon, the rebels kept coming. At some four hundred yards away, they began to spread out, but they did not slow. When they reached a point about three hundred yards from the outermost earthworks of the defenders, Major Rykards's troopers began to fire, if deliberately and slowly.

Alastar saw more rebels begin to fall.

Then the advance changed. The attackers angled slightly, trotting and then stopping, if only for a moment, but always moving forward, the mass of foot troopers moving inexorably eastward toward the defenders. Few of the attackers actually fired their rifles, even as more of them dropped to the measured fire from Rykards's troopers.

Alastar waited until the advancing foot troopers were within less than a hundred yards before ordering, “Red pepper across the front ranks.” He wished he'd said “leading attackers,” because there really weren't any ranks as such, but the imagers laid down a fog of pepper that covered the first three or four yards of those advancing.

That slowed the attackers, and the rifle fire from behind the earthworks picked up. More attackers fell, but the remainder surged forward. Another company of mounted troopers charged past the imagers, past the revetments, slashing into the middle of the attack and cutting a path through the center. The attackers fell back for a time, but then, by force of sheer numbers, began to hem in the mounted troopers.

Another mounted company rode forward, coming from the reserves behind and to the south of Alastar, followed by yet another mounted company. Before long, the rebels and the defenders were so tightly interwoven in the fighting along the lower earthworks that Alastar could see no effective use of the imagers.

Wilkorn's cannon were picking off attackers farther away, but were useless against those rebels engaging the defenders around the revetments.

Alastar kept looking to the north, fearful that, in the middle of the chaos, the rebels might disengage and make a mass attack there to punch through the defenders and gain control of the river road and thus open their way to L'Excelsis, but Weidyn had moved Fifth Company slightly forward, and the fighting to the north was more scattered.

At that moment, Alastar heard a horn triplet, repeated twice, but he could see no movement anywhere to the west, including from the company or so of rebel troopers surrounding the command group—still almost a mille from the fighting—whose red and black banners drooped in the still air under the midday sun.

Midday?
Had the entire morning passed already?

He kept looking, then realized that the southernmost section of the rebel forces was marching up the river road toward the left flank of the defending force, a flank greatly weakened by the use of the mounted troops to repulse and hold the earthen revetments against the massive assault from the west.

“Imagers! On me!” Alastar dropped his concealment and turned the gray to the south and slightly uphill. By the time he reached the river road itself, Cyran was riding beside him and the other imagers were directly behind them.
Solid Cyran.

Alastar then re-created a screen concealment in front of himself.

When they reined up behind the thin line of foot that constituted the south defense perimeter holding the road, the leading rank of the rebels was still almost a hundred yards away. Directly behind the first five or six ranks was what appeared to be a moving square of iron some five yards by fifteen, pressing inexorably northward along the river road.

The last thing Alastar wanted to deal with was another set of imagers, but he couldn't imagine who or what else was inside the second wagon-turtle. He immediately attempted to image another cannon shell into the wagon-turtle … but it was as though he hit a wall.
A shield wall.
Then he felt something jab at his own shields, a probe followed by an immediate hail of bullets from the rebels' mounted rifles that passed over the heads of both the attacking and defending foot troopers, with at least four or five bullets slamming into his shields.

You need to stop them.
He tried again to image a cannon shell, this time trying to place the shell in the rear under the hooves of the oxen. Even doing that left him light-headed, and he rocked slightly in the saddle before recovering.

The explosion was muffled, but the rear of the wagon-turtle sagged, and the entire assembly lurched to a halt.

“Commence firing!” ordered the foot commander.

Measured shots followed, a continuous and methodical barrage that tore into the advancing rebels, but it seemed that for every man who fell another, if not two, took his place. At the same time, the shots from the mounted rifles behind the advancing foot were taking a toll on the defenders. The wagon-turtle remained in place, little more than a hundred yards away, and a squad of attackers moved up and used the shields of the turtle as a safer emplacement from which to fire at the defenders.

Alastar took a quick glance to the west, but could only see a continuing seething mass of troopers—both mounted and on foot—battling it out generally just before or around the earthworks. He thought he'd only looked away a moment, but when he looked back to the river road before him, the attackers were within yards of the remaining foot defenders. “Imagers! Darts to the attackers. Those directly in front of you! Now!”

The initial stream of darts stopped the attackers cold, but only for several moments before they began to regroup.

Alastar tried something else—just imaging a constant stream of darts across the front rows of the attackers. The darts hit with such force that the bodies of the attackers piled up into a low wall.