They began to die as more volleys roared, and their fellows stumbled forward over their bodies, floundering and cursing in the shallows, wading deeper, crouching to hide as much of themselves below the water as they could.
And then the lead ranks lunged upright, screaming as the rear ranks drove them forward onto the sharpened stakes and needle-pointed caltrops hidden in the river. They thrashed and shrieked in the scarlet water, and the deadly waves of musketry ripped them to pieces.
Round shot hissed overhead or thudded into the earthwork as the Host’s guns scrambled into action, and one of them slammed into the arlak beside Tamman. The barrel spun away, the carriage disintegrated, and something less than human twitched and mewled amid the wreckage. His guns were protected by the redoubt’s embrasures, but they were also outnumbered. More and more of the Guard’s artillery was coming into action between the bleeding infantry columns, and musketeers stood fully exposed on the flanks to fire into the smoke. They were shooting blind at extreme range, but even with their low rates of fire, an awesome number of balls buzzed overhead.
He stared down into the carnage of the ford. Pikemen and musketeers waded out into that madness, advancing until grapeshot or musket balls hammered them under, but the men behind them were stopping at last. Or were they? He strained his eyes and swallowed. They weren’t stopping; they were reforming.
High-Captain Sertal’s face was white under its dust and grime, but his hoarse voice cut through the din. His forward companies absorbed the survivors of Vrikadan’s and Martas’s men, standing with iron discipline under the tornado of the heretics’ fire. Under-captains and sergeants shouted orders. Where necessary, they kicked troopers into formation with boots caked in bloody mud, and Sertal winced as another deadly lash of grapeshot scythed through his men. He couldn’t hold them here long, but he
Sean checked the scanners once more as the zone south of the High Road became a solid mass of advancing Guardsmen, then nodded to Tibold.
“They’re stuck in deep,” he said, trying to hide his anxiety, “and Rokas is sending his reserves forward. It’s time.”
“Aye, Lord Sean!” Tibold began snapping orders, and twenty thousand men, without a single pike among them, rose to their feet in the “impassable” woods north of the Host.
Sertal thrust his sword at the redoubts and swept it down in command, and his men lurched into the holocaust. Tamman saw them coming and turned to shout another order to Lornar, but Lornar was down, head smashed by one of those blind-fired musket balls. He grabbed a captain’s shoulder. The Malagoran’s face—it was Captain Ithun, one of the ex-Guard officers—was white and strained, and he went still whiter as he realized
“Pikes forward!” he bellowed.
The chagors in Tamman’s advanced gun pits fired one last salvo, and their crews snatched for swords and pikes as the bleeding ranks of the Guard won free of the water at last. A dozen gun captains paused to light fuses before they grabbed up their own weapons, and the madmen who’d fought their way through everything the Malagorans could throw lunged towards them with a howl. Fresh concussions turned howls to screams as the crude mines seeded the river bank in fountains of flame and flying limbs, and the survivors wavered, but Sertal’s men drove forward, and edged steel stabbed and cut.
Malagoran pikemen funneled through sally ports in their earthworks and foamed over the foremost Guardsmen behind the high, quavering Malagoran yell, then crashed into the ranks behind them. They thrust forward, bills rising and falling, shearing limbs and plucking heads, and hurled the Host back into the fords, but there they stopped. The hand-to-hand butchery blocked the chagors, and the arlaks were locked in a duel with the Guard’s gun lines. Musketry continued to crash out above their heads, yet the Host was taking fewer fire casualties now, and the lead formations had cleared most of the obstacles with their own bodies. Thousands of Guardsmen lay dead or wounded, but more pressed forward, and sheer weight of numbers began to drive the Malagorans back.
Captain Yurkal stared south at the clouds of smoke, listening to the artillery and crashing musketry. The screams were faint with distance, a savage sound under the explosions, and he was guiltily aware of his own relief at being spared that hell. Yurkal was a son of Mother Church, but he was also grateful his dragoons had been deployed so far from the fighting, and—
He jerked in astonishment as his banner-bearer fell, clawing at his chest. There was a meaty thud as the sergeant beside him slid to the ground as well, and Yurkal whirled as the popping sounds behind him registered.
Three hundred paces away, still hidden in the edge of the forest, a green-and-brown-clad marksman settled his rifled malagor into its rest and peered through his peep sight. He squeezed the trigger, and a twenty-millimeter bullet blew Captain Yurkal’s heart apart.
Sean watched the snipers methodically pick off officers and noncoms while the rest of his men debouched from the forest. It wasn’t chivalrous … but, then, neither was war.
More officers fell, and suddenly leaderless troopers began to panic. Most were already fleeing, and the pairs of malagors continued to fire, cutting down the handful of Guardsmen who stood while leather-lunged sergeants cursed their own men into formation.
Fifteen thousand men formed a three-deep battle line three kilometers long. The Malagoran yell quivered down their front, and they swept south, and five thousand more followed as a reserve.
Lord Marshal Rokas’s head snapped up at the crackle of musketry. He spun to the north and gaped as a new wall of smoke billowed. Impossible!
He jerked his spyglass open, and his blood ran chill. His mounted screen had dissolved like leaves in a tempest, and even as he watched the advancing lines of muzzle flashes ripped at the fugitives’ backs.
A trap. This entire position was a trap, and he’d walked right into it! Tibold had done the unthinkable, splitting his outnumbered forces, deploying those oncoming musketeers in a position from which they couldn’t possibly retreat in order to hit him when he was mired in the fords!
The plan’s insane audacity stunned him, but half his total force was committed to the lunge at the fords. Another quarter had been left behind, lest it constrict his movement. That left barely thirty thousand men to meet
