with red and yellow flame.
Corfe was able to see the result of the first few salvoes before the smoke hid the advancing hordes. The Torunnans were using delayed-fuse shells that exploded in midair and scattered jagged metal in a deadly radius beneath them. He saw swathes of the enemy fall or be tossed into the air and ripped to pieces, like crops flattened by an invisible wind. Then they came on again, dressing their broken lines and screaming their hoarse battlecries. There were hundreds of ladders in their midst, carried shoulder-high.
“What of their numbers, Corfe?” Andruw shouted. “What do you make them?”
How to set a figure to that broiling mass of humanity? But Corfe was a soldier, a professional. His mind played with figures in his head.
“Nine or ten thousand in the first wave,” he shouted back, the smoke aching his throat already. “But that’s just the first wave.”
Andruw grinned out of a blackened face. “Plenty for everyone then.”
They were at the foot of the walls now, a roaring multitude horned with scaling ladders and baying like animals. The rising sun lit up the further hills, shafted through the billowing powder smoke and made something ethereal and beautiful out of it, the defenders seeming to be flat silhouettes in the fiery reek. The gunners of the lighter pieces depressed their guns to maximum and began firing down into the packed masses below, whilst the arquebusiers were holding fire, waiting for Andruw’s order.
Scaling ladders thumping against the battlements. Grapnels, ropes and a shower of crossbow bolts that knocked down half a dozen men in Corfe’s vision alone. The ladders began to quiver as the enemy climbed up them.
“Hold your fire, arquebusiers!” Andruw shouted. A few nervous men were already letting loose.
Faces at the top of the ladders, black as fiends from hell.
“Fire!”
A rippling series of explosions as two thousand arquebuses went off almost as one. Many ladders crashed back down in the press below, unbalanced by the death throes of the men at their tops. Others remained, and more of the enemy continued their climb.
“Fork-men, to the front!” the order went out, and Torunnans came forward bearing objects shaped like long-handled pitchforks. Two or three of the defenders would push these against the scaling ladders and send them out in a slow, graceful arc, packed with men, to swing down into red ruin in the massed ranks at the foot of the walls.
The assault paused, checked. The noise of men shouting and shrieking, the boom of cannon and crack of arquebus were deafening.
“Have they no strategy at all?” Andruw was asking Corfe. “They’re like a ram butting a gate. Do they reckon nothing of casualties?”
“They don’t have to,” Corfe told him. “Remember what Martellus said? Attrition. They are losing men by the thousand, we by the score. But they can afford to lose their thousands. They are as numberless as the sand of a beach.”
They stood near the gate that was the main entrance to this part of the fortress. The sun was rising rapidly and a rosy-gold light was playing over the scene. They could see through gaps in the smoke to where fresh forces were already being marshalled on the hills beyond. The Merduk guns were being brought into play now, but they were firing high. Most of their shots seemed to be falling into the Searil, raising fountains of white, shattered water.
“So they use explosive shells, too,” Andruw said, surprised.
It was something the Ramusians had invented only twenty years ago.
“Yes, and incendiaries. I hope we have enough firefighters.”
“Fire is the last thing we have to worry about. Here they come again.”
A fresh surge at the foot of the walls. Crossbow bolts came clinking and cracking against the battlements in a dark hail. Men fell screaming from the catwalks.
Another assault, the ladders lifted up and thrown down once more. The ground at the bottom of the fortifications was piled with corpses and wreckage.
“I don’t like it,” Corfe said. “This is too easy.”
“Too easy!”
“Yes. There is no thought behind these assaults. I think they are a cover for something else. Even Shahr Baraz does not throw his men’s lives away for no gain.”
There was an earth-shuddering concussion that seemed to come from beneath their very feet. Almost the entire gatehouse was enveloped in thick smoke through which flame speared and flapped.
“They’ve blown the gate!” Andruw cried.
“I’ll see to it. Stay here. They’ll make another assault to cover the breaching party.”
Corfe ran down the wide stairs to the courtyards and squares below. Torunnan soldiers and refugee civilians were running about carrying powder, shot, wounded men, match and water. He seized on a group of a dozen who possessed arquebuses and led them into the shadow of the gatehouse.
There in the arch a fierce fire was burning, and the massive gates were askew on their hinges, white scars marking the shattered wood. Already the Merduk engineers were swarming through the gaps and a hundred more were clustered behind them. It was like watching dark maggots writhing in a wound.
“Present pieces!” Corfe yelled to his motley command, and the arquebuses were levelled.
“Give fire!”
The volley flung back a score of Merduks who were clambering through the wrecked gates.
“Out swords. Follow me!” Corfe cried, and led the Torunnans at a run.
They stepped over wriggling, maimed men and began slashing and hewing in the burning gloom of the arch like things possessed. In a few moments there were no Merduks left alive inside the gatehouse, and those trying to force their way through the battered portals had limbs and heads lopped off by the defenders.
The fire spread. Corfe was dimly aware of men with water buckets. He hacked the fingers off a hand that was pulling at the broken gate. Then someone was tugging him away.
“The murder-holes! They’re going to use them. Out of the gateway!”
He allowed himself to be hauled away, half blind with sweat and smoke. The Torunnans fell back.
Immediately the Merduks were squirming through the gates again. In seconds a score of them were on the inside and more of their fellows were joining them by the moment.
“
A golden torrent poured down on the hapless Merduks from holes in the ceiling of the gatehouse. It was not liquid, but as soon as it struck the men below they screamed horribly, tearing at their armour and dropping their swords. They flailed around in agony for long minutes whilst their comrades halted outside, watching in helpless fury.
“What is it?” Corfe asked. “It looks like—”
“Sand,” he was told by a grinning soldier. “Heated sand. It gets inside the armour and fries them to a cinder. More economical than lead, wouldn’t you say?”
“Make way, there!” A gunnery officer and a horde of blackened figures were man-hauling two broad- muzzled falcons into position before the gate. As the torrent of sand faltered the Merduks outside began clambering inside again with what seemed to Corfe to be arrant stupidity or maniac courage.
The falcons went off. Loaded with scrap metal, they did the remains of the gates little damage, but the Merduks in the archway were blown to shreds. Blood and fragments of flesh, bone and viscera plastered the interior of the archway.
“They’re falling back!” someone yelled.
It was true. The attack on the gate was being abandoned for the moment. The Merduks were drawing away.
“Keep these pieces posted here, and get engineers to work on these gates,” Corfe commanded the gunnery officer, not caring what his rank might be. “I’ll send men down from the wall to reinforce you as soon as I can.”
Without waiting for a reply, he ran for the catwalk stairs to rejoin the men on the battlements.
Another assault—the cover for the breaching party—had just been thrown back. Men were reloading the
