The Reformer

There. Pacing stolidly along, and no more than fifteen paces away, now. Have to get him to turn around.

'Hey, you Confed donkey fucker,' Esmond said, in a conversational tone. 'Did you know that your mother used to suck my dad's dick, and for free?'

The Confed soldier whirled at the sound, gaping. Esmond's arm whipped forward; it was an awkward position to throw from, but a clout shot at this distance-there were fires in iron baskets further in towards the shore. Iron crunched through the mail shirt the trooper wore, and he pitched over backwards. Esmond dropped four feet to the surface of the causeway; this section was half-complete, and loose rock shifted and crunched under the hobnails of his sandals.

The sentries died, quickly and with relative quiet. Men were forming up around him; others were coating the logs that ran along both sides of the causeway with oil and tallow brought along in leather sacks. More were handing up small wooden barrels from the boats.

'Ready, General,' Donnuld panted.

'Follow me.'

The Strikers followed. Behind them were Preblean archers; he'd picked them himself, from men with good sea-beast hornbows and plenty of experience. Forward. . Yes. They really didn't fortify their construction yard.

Siege engines reared about him in the dark, like monstrous beasts in a child's nightmare. More sentries died, but a few survived long enough to sound an alarm. They'd have to work quickly.

Adrian and his men ran to the larger engines, the siege towers and heavy catapults. The kegs of gunpowder went underneath them, hastily buried. Esmond let his nose guide him to stacks of timber, mostly fresh-cut pine oozing sap.

'Right here, boys,' he called.

Covered firepots were brought out, torches lit and whipped into flame. Esmond thrust one under a stack of four-by-six timbers and shouted glee as the wood began to catch. Others of his men were kicking over barrels and pots of pitch and tar, throwing long coils of rope onto growing blazes; the archers were sending fire-arrows buzzing about, into piles of cordage and wood further in, into tents and heaps of sailcloth and fodder. Esmond was whirling another torch around his head when a lead-weighted dart whipped by his ear close enough for him to feel the draft, going thunk into a timber and whining with a malignant buzz like an enormous, very pissed-off bee.

'Fall in!' he called. Beside him the signaler sounded his horn, and the bannerman waved the flag. 'Fall in! Everyone else back to the boats!'

The Strikers formed up at the head of the causeway-most of them, at least, and anyone too hopped up or too stupid to remember the signals he'd gone over at great length deserved what was going to happen to them. Happy arsonists ran by, climbing the wooden edges of the causeway and sliding down to the boats or into the water, whooping. The Confeds were reacting at last, though; he could see blocks of them working their way through the burning equipment, and the fires were making this area as bright as day.

'Discourage them,' he said to the Preblean in charge of the archers. The man nodded and turned to his own command: 'Loose!'

The archers drew to the ear, thumbrings around the strings of their powerful composite bows. A cloud of yardlong shafts whickered out, vanishing from sight into the darkness and smoke above, then whipping back down into the gathering Confed ranks. A dozen men went down, silent or jerking or screaming and ripping at the barbed shafts in their flesh. More shrugged aside slight wounds, or started when armor or shields deflected the steel raining down out of the night.

'Keep it up,' Esmond said, teeth showing. 'Pour it on!'

The Confed noncoms were hustling their sleepy men into battle order, shoving, bellowing orders. The formation began to shake itself out into the dreaded double line of the Confederation, shields up, darts rocking back ready on thick muscular peasant arms. Here and there a man fell as an arrow or slingstone went home, and the formation rippled as it closed up to maintain the precise one-yard gap between each soldier. In a minute, that living wall would begin to walk. .

Except that in less than a minute. .

BWAMMMP.

'Yes!' Esmond shouted.

Dirt, flame and splintered wood vomited up from beneath one of the siege towers. Shattered along one side it began to sway, leaned drunkenly, and then fell-four stories of heavy timber, crashing down across the back of the Confed formation.

About three hundred of them, Esmond thought. But-

BWAMMMP.

The other siege tower writhed as half a dozen ten-pound kegs of powder went off beneath it; this one disintegrated where it stood, showering the wavering Confed troops with heavy bone-cracking lumps and baulks of timber.

'Charge!' Esmond shouted.

The trumpeter sounded it, but the Strikers were already running forward, howling. A cloud of javelins surged out before them, and the archers fired over their heads. When they struck the Confeds, they struck in a solid line abreast, struck men whose formation had already been shaken. A rippling series of explosions shook their nerve even more, as catapults leapt into the air in fragments and rained down out of the dark.

'Wodep's thunderbolts!' a Confed trooper bawled, and threw down his shield.

The noncom behind him killed the man before he'd taken his second panic-stricken step, but then the Emeralds were upon them. Esmond threw at point-blank range, and the javelin crunched through the Confed's face to knock his helmet off as the point met the inside rear with an audible clank. He punched his buckler into another face, stabbed a throat, brought the buckler around to break the wrist that held an assegai and then stab downward into a thigh. The Confeds shattered the way a clay winejug might when dropped on solid stone. . and spattered red in the same way, too.

'Rally!' Esmond shouted, and the trumpeter blew it again and again. Some of the men were reluctant; one or two were so victory-drunk that they careened off into the darkness. 'Rally!'

'Fall back to the boats,' he went on.

'Feels good to see their backs, by Wodep,' Donnuld said, as they jogged back.

Behind them the Confed siege works and timber stores were fully involved, a cone of bright orange flame rising into the spark-shot night and underlighting its own black cloud of smoke. Glorious, glorious destruction, Esmond thought, feeling the savage heat of it on his face.

They reached the edge of the causeway, slid down into the boats. Esmond took a torch and tossed it at the oil-soaked wood as they left; flames ran across the timbers in a sheet of orange-red, adding to the hellish symphony of flames.

'It won't be as easy the next time,' he said, chuckling. 'But I think we'll come up with some way to annoy them.'

He started as Adrian nodded beside him. 'We haven't shown them most of our surprises yet,' he said. 'Technological surprise.'

'What's technology?' Esmond asked, curious.

'That's what the Confeds are about to find out, brother.'

* * *

'What am I going to do with you?' Demansk asked his daughter.

She lounged back in the camp chair and sipped from her clay cup. 'Velipad piss. . well, you're not going to marry me off, not after all this.'

Demansk flushed and hit the table with a fist, making the jug bounce. 'You don't speak to your father like that, missy!' he growled, his voice filling the tent like a direbeast's warning. 'And a tent is not a place to discuss family matters at this volume.'

They were both speaking Emerald, but so could any Confed citizen with any pretensions to education. The ranker guards outside probably couldn't, and there probably wasn't anyone else within earshot. . probably.