ladder team next to mine set his foot against one and collapsed in a heap. He let out a scream that gave away our position, but there wasn’t time to do anything about it. I plunged forward, hoping to Maletus I didn’t meet the same fate.
The Scarred One took pity on me, in so far at least as I made it through without injury. A few feet before the battlements I set the bottom of the ladder in the dirt, and after a second Adolphus sent the rest hurtling up against the stone. I unsheathed a knife and shoved it between my teeth, then clambered up the rungs before my partner could do the same.
Cannon fire from the battlements above us flared in the night, but I kept my eyes on the wall and climbed as quick as I could. If there was anyone looking down I was dead, an easy shot with a crossbow or a barrel of burning pitch. That last was the worst, heated tallow eating through your clothes and sticking to your skin, maiming anyone who survived, a long life begging coin and frightening children. Course, if I was lucky the fall alone would kill me – a happy thought indeed.
On the top rung I discovered the motherfucking ladder was short. I was still a good two feet from the rim of the battlements, but at that point there was no going back. Hoping to Sakra Adolphus had those bovine arms of his firm on the bottom struts, I braced myself and leapt for the summit. My fingers found purchase on the stone, but it was an agonizing moment before I could swing my legs up.
It took a second for me to get my bearings. I’d been so certain the run over would kill me I hadn’t bothered to give much thought to what I’d do if I made it to the top. Happily the Dren nearest to me seemed as surprised as I was, hesitating to do the obvious and run me through with the pig sticker he’d been issued for that exact purpose. I got over my shock quicker than he did his, pulled my knife from my teeth and slipped it between his ribs. He moved at the last second, turning a lethal strike into a glancing blow, but it unmanned him enough for me to get him by the shoulders and trip him over the side.
A trio of guards from down the line were coming to their comrade’s aid, too slow for salvation but in plenty of time for revenge. I pulled a grenade loose from my bandolier and struck the flashpoint against the floor, setting the fuse to light, then tossed it underhand and dropped to the ground. A deafening caterwaul and a wave of flesh. I pushed myself up as quick as I could, every second lost a desperate one. A thread of entrails was caught in my hair and I brushed it off negligently, one more horror I didn’t have time to process. If I gave them a chance to fall on me I was good as buried, audacity was all I had. I pulled my trench blade from its sheath and took a running leap into the sea of men swelling up the stairwell from the courtyard below.
The Great War was the largest conflict in human history. Millions of men killing each other across the breadth of the Thirteen Lands. You get enough people together and all kinds of wacky shit starts to happen – it’s just a function of the numbers. I once saw a man take an entire Dren platoon all on his lonely, screaming like Maletus and swinging a flamberge one-handed. Walked half of them back tame as sheep, fifteen-odd soldiers with their eyes down. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it, but I did and it happened. A shell got him a few days later, but he was the toast of the division in the interim.
Point being what happened was just luck, random and blind – any stray bolt could have done me, and there must have been a hundred thousand soldiers as hard as me, or harder. But that night, I didn’t run into any of them. That night, couldn’t no one touch me.
I moved on that part of the brain that is below the conscious mind, which is remembered only impersonally, as if watching the actions of a third party. The edge of my blade surged forward of its own volition, and what it touched dissipated like water. In the narrow confines of the staircase numbers didn’t count for anything, it was one-to-one. The Dren in front of me held his spear above his head, lips trembling, and I sheared my blade straight through the shaft and into bone. The next one got a boot in his chest hard enough to crack a few ribs, and he fell from the steps, carrying one of his mates with him.
I was mad with the sheer joy of it. I’d have laughed if I’d had the breath.
The last two broke and ran – one I caught while he was turning but the other took off at a good sprint and I didn’t bother to chase after him. At the distant edges of my mind I realized we’d broken through, could see my men running past me, down the other sets of steps and into the city proper. The hand on my shoulder was Adolphus’s, a wound on his arm that bore looking into but a smile on his face just the same. He laughed and I laughed with him. After a few moments there was an explosion off to the right, the space I’d carved giving our sappers time to demolish the main gate. Reinforcements would be on their way, but it wouldn’t matter – whatever strength had allowed the besieged to hold out against the full might of the Rigun Empire was utterly spent. Immediate survival was now the sole concern.
For a few blissful moments I stood there, watching as, I assumed at the time, the rest of my company chased after the fleeing Dren – and I felt like I was supposed to feel. Like a man who had done his duty, right as the falling rain.
Then the screams started, distinct from the noise of battle by the presence of feminine voices, and I realized, neither for the first time nor the last, that I was a fool.
The soldiers streaming past me weren’t under my command but I shrieked at them anyway – halt, form a line, retreat, anything I could think of. No one listened. Victory can unmake an army just the same as defeat. Two months camped in front of those walls, freezing and wet, while the people inside lobbed explosives down on our heads – I guess we’d worked up something of a grudge.
In the middle of the street a man barely old enough to shave held a woman against the ground. She struggled desperately, screaming for help, and he slapped her silent, then went back to struggling with her petticoat. Adolphus roared over and tore him off, nearly ripping the boy’s arm out of its socket. In his pre-coital excitement he seemed barely to notice, laughing as he pulled his pants on. ‘All right, all right – officers first. No need to get rough, there’s plenty of wool to go around.’ He ran off into the night, the streets full of prey.
His victim stared up at us, certain that we were next. I remember that look better than anything else about that night, the fear in her eyes and the hate behind it. After a long moment she got to her feet and sprinted off into an alleyway.
In the distance a line of fires were spreading, the product of an upturned candle or deliberate vandalism. My friends and comrades continued their triumphant rush into the city proper. I’d given up trying to stop them. In the light of the burning metropolis they seemed faceless, interchangeable. If you weren’t up to it, the next man in line certainly would be – so why not be up to it? The herd don’t have no code. I’d learned that a long time ago. I wasn’t sure why it still surprised me.
I looked up at Adolphus. He looked back down at me. We fell off into a side street. After about a hundred yards we stopped in front of a house, decently built but nothing special, residence of a shopkeeper or minor merchant. Adolphus put a foot in the middle of the door and it splintered away to nothing.
The burgher standing behind the entrance held a carving knife forgotten in one hand, eyes saucer wide, any will to fight lost at the sight of the giant. Behind him stood his wife and daughter, meat-faced and wide-hipped, almost indistinguishable, clutching each other with terrified ferocity. Adolphus grabbed the man’s wrist, firmly but not cruelly. Steel clanged to the ground. I slipped past my partner and took a seat at a kitchen table that dominated the room. Private Gustav took the one across from me. ‘Food,’ I said in my pidgin Dren. ‘Drink.’
The matron sobbed piteously, a tune her progeny soon took up. I repeated my request to the old man, and after a moment he shook himself out of his shock and headed to the larder. Adolphus stared off at the wall with sad, dull eyes.
We spent the rest of the night like that, our host bringing us dark beer and what sundries were left in his pantry, the mother and daughter never letting go of each other, convinced at any moment we would break our repast and ravish them. Between the two of us we finished off half a keg, trying to get drunk enough to forget what was going on around us without passing so deeply into inebriation as to allow the old man a chance to slit our throats. It was a difficult task we set ourselves, and we didn’t quite meet it.
In the darkness outside, terrible things happened.
The pillage lasted three days, after which the men gradually formed back into that shape that distinguishes an army from a band of marauders. I daresay there were some men in my company who spent those days like Adolphus and I did; I daresay there weren’t many. I would have received a promotion for my role in the assault, but the second afternoon I got drunk and broke the jaw of a man who turned out to be my captain, and it was all Roland could do to keep me from being busted down in rank, or flogged.
