"I told you these'd come in useful," Grammek Dinnalsyn said.
The weapon in the revetment of sandbags, timber and sheet-iron on the forecastle of the Chakra was a stubby cast-steel tube nearly as tall as a man, joined to a massive circular disk-plate of welded wrought iron and steel by a ball-and-socket joint. It was supported and aimed by a metal tripod, long threaded bars and handwheels to turn for elevation and traverse. The bore was twenty centimeters, more than twice that of a normal field-gun, and rifled. Beside the weapon was a stack of shells, cylinders with stubby conical caps and a driving band of soft gunmetal around their middle; at the rear of each was a perforated tube. The crews would wrap silk bags of gunpowder around the tubes before they dropped them down the barrel, a precise number for a given range at a given elevation. The base charge was a shotgun shell; when it hit the fixed firing pin at the bottom of the barrel, it would flash off the ring charges around the tube.
One thing Boyce had told them was that the casements of Fort Wager had no overhead protection. None was needed with normal artillery, given the placement of the fort.
"I know they're useful, Grammeck," Raj said. "Their little brothers were extremely handy in the Port Murchison fighting." It had been more like a massacre, but never mind. "They're also extremely heavy. Get me one that can move like a field gun, and I'll take dozens of them with me wherever I go."
He walked down the deck of the Chakra, striding easily; it had been two days from the north coast to Port Wager, more than time enough to get his sea legs back. Many of the platoon of 5th Descott troopers aboard were still looking greenly miserable, landsmen to the core. They'd do their jobs, though, puking or not, and he intended to give them a stable firing platform. The huge sails of the three-master tilted above him; she was barque-rigged, fore-and-aft sails on the rear mast and square on the other two. Water, wind and cordage creaked and spoke; he squinted against the dazzle and made out the tall headland of Fort Wager to the north. There was a brisk onshore breeze, common in the early afternoon. Center had predicted it would hold long enough today—
probability 78% ±3, Center corrected him. i am not a prophet. i merely estimate.
—and at worst, they could kedge in the last little way, hauling on anchors dropped out in front by men in longboats.
He leaned on the emplacement. The crew looked up from giving their weapon a final check and braced; most of them were stripped to boots and the blue pants with red-laced seams of their service.
"Rest easy, boys," he said, returning their salute.
Artillerymen were mostly from the towns, and their officers from the urban middle classes; both unlike any other Army units in the Civil Governments forces. Many cavalry commanders barely acknowledged their existence. Pure snobbery, he thought, they're invaluable if you use them right. Their engineering skills, for example, and general technical knowledge. Far too many rural nobles weren't interested in anything moving that they couldn't ride, hunt or fuck, like so many Brigaderos except for basic literacy.
"This one's all up to you," he went on to the gunners. "Infantry can't do it, cavalry can't do it. You're the only ones with a chance."
"We'll whup 'em for you, Messer Raj!" the sergeant growled.
"So you will, by the Spirit," he replied. "See you in the fort."
Inwardly, he was a little uneasy at the way that verbal habit had caught on; Master Raj was the way a personal retainer back on the estate would have addressed him. His old nurse, for example, or the armsmaster who'd taught him marksmanship and how to handle a sword. Curse it, these men are soldiers of the Civil Government, not some barb chief's warband! he thought.
you are right to be concerned, Center said. however, the phenomenon is useful at present.
He took a slightly different tack with the cavalry troopers waiting belowdecks. The ship's gunwales had been built up and pierced with loopholes, but there was no sense in exposing the men or hindering the sailors before there was need.
"Day to you, dog-brothers," he said with a grin, slapping fists with the lieutenant in command. "Done with your puking yet?"
"Puked out ever-fukkin'-thin' but me guts, ser," one man said.
"It'll be tax-day in Descott when you lose your guts, Robbi M'Teglez," Raj said. He'd always had a knack for remembering names and faces; Center amplified it to perfection. The trooper flushed and grinned. "You're the one brought me that wog banner at Sandoral, aren't you?"
"Yisser, Messer Raj," the man said. "Me Da got it, an' the carbine 'n dog ye sent. 'N the priest back home read t' letter from the Colonel on Starday 'n all."
The troopers comrades were looking at him with raw envy. Raj went on: "We'll be sailing in through the barb cannonade; oughtn't to be more than twenty minutes or so. Not much for those of you who saw off the wogboys at Sandoral. For those who weren't there—well, you get to learn a new prayer."
"Prayer, ser?" one asked.
He had the raw look of a youth not long off the farm, barely shaving, but the big hands that gripped his rifle were competent enough. Most yeomen-tenants in Descott sent one male per generation to the Army in lieu of land-taxes. There were no peons in Descott, and relatively few slaves. Widows, however, were plentiful enough.
A squadmate answered him. "Per whut weuns about t'receive, may t'Spirit make us truly thankful," he said. "Don't git yer balls drawed up, Tinneran. Ain't no barbs got guns loik t'ragheads."
That brought a round of smiles, half tension and half anticipation. Those who'd waited all day in the bunkers while the Colonist guns pounded them, waiting for the waves of troops in red jellabas to charge through rifle-fire with their repeating carbines . . . they'd know. Those who hadn't been there couldn't be told. They could only be shown.
"Once we're through, the gunners have their jobs to do. It's our job to make sure the barbs don't come down the rocks, wade out and take 'em the way the wild dog took the miller's wife, from behind. You boys ready to do a man's work today?"
Their mounts were back at the base-camp, but the noise the men made would have done credit to the half-ton carnivores they usually rode.
"So commend your souls to the Spirit, wait for the orders, and pick your targets, lads," he finished. "To Hell or plunder, dog-brothers."
"I thought they were about to mutiny, from the sound," Dinnalsyn said as Raj came blinking back into the sunlight on the quarterdeck.
"Not likely," Raj said.
The headland was coming up with shocking speed and the four ships were angling in on the course he'd set, the one that would expose them to the least possible number of guns as they cut in toward the cliffs. Spirit of Man, but I feel good, he thought. Frightened, yes. Harbors attracted downdraggers, and he still had bad dreams about the tentacles and gnashing beaks and intelligent, waiting eyes crowding around the wharfs when they tipped the Squadron dead into the water after Port Murchison. Eight thousand men dead in an afternoon; the sea-beasts had been glutted, dragging corpses away to their underwater nests when their stomachs wouldn't take any more flesh.
So he wasn't easy about the chance of going into the water here, no. But after the grinding anxiety of high command, the prospect of action on this scale made him feel . . . young.
Starless Dark, he told himself. I'm not thirty yet!
"You shouldn't be here, sir," Dinnalsyn said, lowering his voice.
"You aren't exactly the first one to tell me that, Colonel," Raj said. His exuberance showed in the light punch he landed on the East Residencer officer's shoulder. "But I have to take it when my wife says it. Let's get on with the job, shall we?"
The Chakra was commanded from the stern, where the quarterdeck held the tall two-man wheel that controlled the rudder and the captain could direct the first mate. Nothing could be done about the vulnerability of the deck crew, who trimmed the lines and climbed into the rigging to wrestle with canvas in response to orders bellowed through a megaphone. Dinnalsyn had seen to putting a C-shaped iron stand around the helm itself, though, with overhead protection and vision-slits, boiler-plate mounted on heavy timbers.
The captain turned to Raj. "Rocks 're bad here," he said. In Spanjol, with a nasal accent; he was a tall ropey-muscled man with flax-pale hair shaven from the back of his head and long mustaches. The tunic he wore was striped horizontally with black and white, heavy canvas with iron rings the size of bracelets sewn to it. With fighting possible, he had shoved the handles of short curve-bladed throwing axes through the rings, and had two long knives in his belt.
A Stalwart wandered down from the north, one of the latest tribe of barbarians to move south out of the Base Area. Possibly the fiercest of all; they would have been much more dangerous if fratricide and patricide hadn't been the national sport of their kings. The day one of them managed to kill off all his rivals and unite the tribe would be a dangerous one for the world.
Raj was not particularly worried about treachery from Captain Lodoviko; offshore, the black plumes showed where the Civil Governments steam rams waited. They were too deep-draught to do this job themselves, but he'd given instructions that any ship which turned back without orders was to be sunk and everyone knew it. He'd also promised every man on board a bonus equivalent to a years pay, with new berths and commands for the mates and captains and enough to buy a share in their ship. Plus, of course, he had forty of his own troops on each ship, ready to shoot down any man who abandoned his station. Everyone knew that, too.
"Steer this course," Raj said. A colored grid dropped down before his eyes, and he swung his arm to align with the pointer Center provided. "Precisely that course, Captain Lodoviko, and change precisely when I tell you. Understood?"
Lodoviko squinted at him, and murmured something in his dialect of Namerique; probably an invocation to one of the dozens of heathen gods the Stalwarts followed. Glim of the Waves, perhaps, or Baffire of the Thunder. Then he grunted orders to the helm and his first mate. The wheel swung, and feet rushed across the deck. Men swarmed into the ratlines, agile as cliff-climbing rogosauroids.
The ship's bow swung and its motion altered as it took the waves at a different angle. The three ships behind swung into line, following as nearly as they could in line astern.
"We're going too fast," Raj said again, his tone remote. "Reduce by . . . two knots, please. Make ready to turn the boat to the left."
"Ship to port. This ain't steered from the same end as a dog, General." Another set of orders from the megaphone, and canvas was snatched up and lashed to spars.
"Whatever. That's right. Now turn to this angle." His arm swung.
Ahead, they were close enough to see the tall cream-colored limestone cliffs, scarred and irregular but nearly vertical; the stone of the fort was the same color, only the smoothness and block-lines marking where it began and the native rock left off. Surf beat on the shingle beach below, and more white water thrashed over rocks and reefs further out. Any one of them could rip the timber bottom of the Chakra open the way a bayonet did a man's belly.
I don't envy Gerrin trying to make them think he's going to do a mass attack in broad daylight, Raj thought, at some level not occupied with his passionless translation of Center's instructions.
Dinnalsyn and his aide had quietly drawn their revolvers, standing behind the binnacle that held the wheel. "Spirit, it's really working," the gunner whispered, in the abstracted tones of a man speaking to himself. "Spirit, maybe he is a bleeding Avatar."
"This heading. Keep this heading."
They were slanting in towards the cliffs at a sixty-degree angle, still more than a kilometer out. The breeze freshened. A cannon boomed, and everyone except Raj jumped. He was too fixed in the strait world of lines and markers Center had clamped over his vision.
"Colonel Staenbridge is demonstrating against the fort, and they're warning him off," he said calmly. "They don't have enough men to crew all their guns. They'll see we're coming in soon enough."
The path to the little pier around the harbor-side angle of the cliffs was much easier sailing, but the last thing he wanted was to be right at the foot of the covered staircase up to the fort. For one thing, small-arms fire from the ramparts could reach a ship there; for another, he was fairly sure the garrison wasn't going to let him sit and shell them without trying to pay a visit.
His back was to the stern rail; he drew his own pistol and thumbed back the hammer. Lodoviko scratched his ribs; he might not have been toying with the haft of one of his axes.
BOOM. Smoke vomited from an embrasure on the seaward side of the fort.
"Think they've seen us," Dinnalsyn said. The air ripped, and water fountained white two hundred meters off the Chakra's bow.
BOOM. It went overhead this time, and the ball struck rock barely submerged a few hundred meters to their left, with a sound like an enormous ball-peen hammer on granite. It bounced back into the air and wobbled another hundred meters to splash in deeper waves.
"Yep, they've seen us all right," the gunner went on dispassionately. "Undershot and overshot. Tricky, with a moving target like this."
"Turn right. This far."
"Y'heard the lubber, port ten!" Lodoviko snapped. Sweat was running down his boiled-lobster face and soaking his tunic, but his directions were precise.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
A wall of smoke along the gunports of the fort where the wall faced them.
Inside, the gunners would be leaping through their intricately choreographed dance. Swabbers to push sponge-tipped poles down the barrels to quench the sparks. Gunner standing by with his leather-sheathed thumb over the touch-hole to keep air out. Linen bags of gunpowder rammed down the muzzle next. The gunner lifting his thumb and jabbing the wire pricker down the hole to split the fabric. A wad going in, a heavy circle of woven hemp rope. Then the ball—four men with a scissor-grip clamp, on guns this heavy. Ram another wad on the ball, as the gunner pushed home the friction fuse and clipped his lanyard to it. Men heaving at ropes and the block-and-tackle squealing as the long black pebbled surface of the cast-iron barrel came back to bear, and the gunner standing on the platform at the rear to aim as the officer called the bearing and men spun the screws.
Fire, as the crew sprang back from the path of recoil, mouths open and hands over their ears. Noise and choking smoke, and the whole thing to do again and again. . . .
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
"Turn right. Hard right, for the beach," Raj said.
He shook his head as the visions faded, and had to grab the captain and scream the directions into his ear; the man turned eyes gone almost black as the pupil swallowed the iris, but he shouted in his turn—then cuffed the helmsman aside and spun the wheel himself, ropy muscle bulging on his bare arms. This time the ripping-cloth noise was much louder, almost shrill, and water splashed across the deck as spouts half as high as the masts collapsed onto them. Instinct made him cover his revolver with his hand as the salt water drenched him.
Dinnalsyn was looking aft. "Damnation to the Starless Dark," he said. "They got the Ispirto dil Hom."
The next ship in line was turning around the pivot of the toppled mainmast, a tangled mass of wood and canvas leaning over the side into the waves. As he watched two more balls struck. One into the deck, but the next was a very lucky accident. It hit the mortar tube square-on, and the piled ammunition went up in a ball of orange fire. When it cleared the whole front of the ship was missing; the stern slid forward on the same course. Men climbed frantically as the rudder flapped into view; then the merchantman slid out of sight. The water was scattered with flotsam, some of which screamed for help to the next vessel through.
Smooth flukes tossed water upward as the downdraggers came, the only help those men would receive today. Tentacles lashed around a floating spar and the men clinging to it. Their shrieks carried a long way over the water.
Raj turned, stomach knotting. Lodoviko was screaming to the sailors in the rigging to drop sail; the bow rose and fell in a choppy motion as the spars came down in a controlled disaster of crashing weight.
"We have to get in," Raj said, grabbing the man by the shoulder.
"We will, you lubber of a soldier! Double-moon tide and an onshore breeze: if we come in too fast, the masts'll come down on your precious popgun when she grounds her belly."
Lodoviko seemed to be an intelligent savage. If that mortar didn't work, they would all be joining the crew of the Spirit of Man very soon.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
"Over," Dinnalsyn said, tracing the trajectories. "Over, over, over . . . over . . . over, over! Overshot, by the Spirit! Their guns can't depress this far."
Raj cast a look back. The next ship, the Rover's Bane, was coming through the gauntlet of waterspouts. Crack. Not undamaged; the top of the middle mast—mainmast, he reminded himself—went over the side, and broken staylines snapped across the deck like the whips of a malignant god. They were turning, now, turning straight in for the beach. City of Wager right behind.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
"Hit, she's hit," Raj said, peering through distance and spray.
"Took out her wheel and the second one smashed her rudder," Dinnalsyn said grimly. Then: "She's still steering, Spirit bugger me blind!"
Lodoviko showed teeth like an ox's, yellow and strong. "Florez. That he-whore is a seaman, by Glim. He takes her in with the sails alone—onshore wind, it can be done. He has balls, that one."
The Stalwart drew two of his axes and turned, clashing them together over his head at the fortress. He brayed out a long war-cry, the overhanging yellow fuzz of his mustache standing out from his lip in food-stained glory with the volume.
"Come out and fight, you Brigade heroes! You pussy-whipped suckers of priest's cocks! Come out of that stone barn and fight—everyone grab a line."
The final rush to the cliff was shocking; a pitching glide, and the rough stone rising to blot out the sky above. The keel caught and grated, then caught again in a chorus of groans and snaps and rending noises. Rigging gave way with sounds like gigantic lute-strings, but none of the masts went over. The impact seemed slow and gentle, but Raj felt his feet jerked out from under him by inertia, and only the iron grip of his sword-hand on the tarred cordage by his side kept him from falling forward. One seaman still in the rigging screamed as he described a long arc shorewards, ending in abrupt silence as he impacted on the cliff and fell limply to the narrow strip of stony beach.
Silence fell for an instant, and then the ship quivered as it settled. The hulls of all four—all three—were U-shaped in section with edge-keels rather than a single deep keelson-mounted fin. The Chakra ground her way down into the loose rocks of the shore and settled almost level. The comparative absence of noise seemed unnatural, like a ringing in the ears. Off to the left the other two ships were grounded rather further out; there was twenty meters of water between the Chakra and dry land, twice that for each of the others.
Dinnalysn picked himself up. "We made it," he said. "They can't touch us now."
"Professional tunnel-vision, Grammeck," Raj said with a grim smile. He checked the loads in his pistol and wiped the surfaces dry with the tail of his uniform jacket. "You mean their artillery can't touch us," he went on, and pointed to their left. The rock bulged out and then curved away; most of Port Wager was hidden by it.
"Nothing to prevent them coming down the stairways around that corner of the cliff and trying their best to beat us to death. Nothing at all."
"No, up two more turns with the same charge," Raj said.
The mortarman looked at him with awe and spun the elevating screw. The four loaders lifted the heavy shell with its sausage-rings of gunpowder at the base and eased it into the muzzle. Everyone else in the sandbagged emplacement on the forecastle bent away, closing their eyes and opening their mouths, jamming thumbs against their ears.
"Fire in the hole!"
Fffumph. The 20-cm tube belched a blade of fire taller than a man; everyone was coughing and waving to clear the dense cloud of smoke. The projectile was visible as a dark blur through the air, then a dot that hesitated high above, and then a blur again.
crump. Muted, because it was exploding within the walls of Fort Wager, but still loud. The shells had a ten-kilogram bursting charge, and their target—the land-facing guns of the fort—had no overhead protection. Only thin partitions between each of the guns on the firing deck, as well. The seaward-facing guns might as well be in Carson Barracks for all the good they were doing the Brigade now.
The problem was that there was no way to observe the fall of shot from the ships; the target was not only half a kilometer north, it was three hundred meters higher up and behind a thick stone wall. The main Civil Government force, massed just out of cannon-shot of the fort walls on the other side, could observe roughly where the shells landed. The signals were rough as well, color-coded rockets; green for "too far," red for "short," white and black for "left" and "right." Even with Center to help with the calculations it was taking time to walk the shells of each gun onto the target. Time they might not have.
"Ser! Here t'barbs come agin!"
Raj vaulted over the sandbags, pivoting on his left hand, and landed in a crouch on the deck. That put him below the level of the built-up railings, which were turning out to be a very good idea. The cluster of boulders at the bulge of the cliff was four hundred meters away. The Brigaderos had gotten set up in there, and proved to be deadly accurate. Not very fast, but there were a lot of them, and they tended to hit what they aimed at. Tinneran, the recruit with the big hands, had found out the hard way when he stood up to get a better shot; he was lying wrapped in canvas and out of the way, with a round blue hole in his forehead and the back blown out of his head. The lieutenant was dead, too. Exactly according to the odds. The two most dangerous positions in a cavalry platoon were junior officer and raw recruit.
Two other fatals, and two too badly hurt to shoot even kneeling and through a loophole. That left him thirty rifles. The loopholes had saved their butts. It was a good thing there was no way to hide coming down the cliff directly overhead, and a man rapelling down on a rope had proved to be a very good target.
He duckwalked to the side of the ship and squinted through a narrow slit in the wooden barricade. Bullets made their flat crack overhead, or thocked into the ship's timbers, or peened as they struck metal. Puffs of smoke rose from the rocks as the marksmen increased their covering fire; at a guess, each was a picked man with two or three others passing him loaded rifle-muskets. The 5th troopers kept hunched down behind the bulletproof sheath of planking that Center had added to Raj's plan. It wasn't worth the risk to stick their rifles out the firing slits until they had better targets.
Which would be shortly. None of the bodies from the last attack was floating; the downdraggers had gotten them all. They'd even gone for the ones on the narrow strip of beach, until both sides shot half a dozen of the repulsive beasts while they dragged themselves half out of the water to seize their prey.
"Here t' bastids come," called the NCO.
"Pick your targets," Raj said, loud but calm. "Fire low."
A first wave came pelting up the beach beneath the cliffs. They wore green-gray jackets and black pants, lobster-tail steel helmets with nasals and cheek-flaps. General's Dragoons, part of the Brigade's regular army. Their rifles were slung, and they carried short ladders.
"Now!"
The Armory rifles began to speak, a steady beat. Men fell, others picked up their ladders and came forward again. Another hundred and another, and the third had no ladders but waded out into the water directly towards the Chakra. The bow was thigh-deep, but there was another four meters or so of sheer hull to climb if they made it that far. The midships railing was half a deck lower than the forecastle, but the water there was waist to chest deep.
Damn, but those are brave men, he thought.
The downdraggers were out there; the men had to come in a dense phalanx and prod with their bayonets. Even so some went down in the tentacles at the edge or rear of the formation, and more stayed to stab and hack at the smooth grey flesh of the predators. For a moment, because the water was being whipped to froth by fire from the Chakra and the other two ships. They were too far out to be attacked, but they could support their sister.
A slapping sound and a grunt. Just down from him a trooper slumped backwards twitching and coughing out sheets of blood from a soft-lead slug through the upper chest. Bullets were cracking into the planking like hail, and if enough came your way one was going to get through the loophole. He switched positions. The hundred men in the first wave were more like thirty now; one turned and tried to run back the way he'd come, and an officer shot him at point-blank range with his pistol. Now they were level with the Chakra's bow and curving out into the water with their ladders, knees coming up high as if in unconscious reluctance to let their feet touch the surface.
"First squad, follow me!" he called, and led them to the bows.
Past the mortar, where another shot came, and another—they were firing for effect, how had he missed the signal they were on target? Up to the bows, and the rough pole ends of an improvised ladder slapping against the boards. He stuck his revolver over the edge and squeezed off three shots; somebody screamed, and a dozen bullets hammered the edge of the planking as he snatched the hand back. Good. Decoyed, by the Spirit. There might be something in the world more futile than trying to reload a musket while standing in a meter of monster-haunted water, but he couldn't think of it offhand.
A Brigadero head came over the rail. He shot, and the bullet keened off the lobster-tail helmet; the man's head jerked around as if he'd been kicked by a riding dog, and he vanished to splash below. One more shot; it missed, but the trooper beside him didn't. The Brigade warrior folded around his belly and jackknifed, flopping across the rail. Raj holstered his revolver and swept out his saber.
"Come on!" he said, and set the point against the ladder.
The trooper did likewise, putting the tip of his long bayonet against the other upright. They pushed—sideways, not straight back. The ladder slid out of sight, and the timbre of the screams below changed from fury to terror. Raj risked a look; something like a mass of animated worms around a serrated beak the length of an arm had the man who'd held the ladder at the base. It was pulling him seaward and biting chunks out of him at the same time; three of his comrades were hacking at it with their swords although the victim was obviously dead; even following it. Which he wouldn't have believed, if he hadn't seen some of the things men would do in combat . . . The squad with him fired point-blank at the next set of men with a ladder.
"Ser."
He whipped around. A Brigadero had gotten to the deck, twenty feet away where the sailors were holding a section with cutlass and boarding axe. Down in the waist of the ship, the ones who'd come without ladders must be climbing over each other's shoulders to get on board. The first man on jerked two revolvers from crossdraw holsters. Raj and the trooper beside him ran back toward him. The Brigade warrior took a careful stance and shot the trooper. The man went over with a yell, clutching his thigh as if to squeeze out the pain and rolling into a tangle of sailcloth and rope hanging to the deck. Raj dove forward over the edge of the forecastle half-deck, kept hold of his saber but landed with his ribs on something hard, and came up wheezing.
Not ten feet from the Brigadero. The man was grinning, or snarling, impossible to say. He aimed with care, as much outside the range of Raj's saber as if he'd been on Maxiluna or lost Earth itself—
Something bright flashed by, rotating into a blur. It stopped at the pistoleer, turning into one of Lodoviko's axes. The bit took the Brigadero at a flat angle between neck and shoulder. Blood jutted through the cut cloth and flesh, spurting; shock convulsed both the mans hands, and the pistols fired. By luck, good or bad, one barked into the deck-planking by Raj's foot, turning a thumb-sized patch into a miniature crater.
He hurdled the dying man's body and turned the next stride into a full-sweep kick at the next man coming over the low rail. The steel-reinforced toe of Raj's riding boot thudded into his chest with an impact that brought a twinge of pain to Raj's lower back. The Brigadero toppled backward and splashed into the water. He came up bent over and gasping with his mouth barely above the surface, wading back towards shore with empty hands. Raj leaned over the rail.
He met the eyes of the man there, the one who had been standing chest deep so his comrades could climb up him and onto the ship. The bearded snarling face showed only an intense concentration; his right hand went back for the sword slung over his shoulder. Raj could see something else; a smooth upwelling in the water, a track heading straight for the enemy soldier's back. He leaned and thrust; the point punched into the standing man's neck. His eyes were turning up as he slid off the point.
A mercy, Raj thought.
Fdump. Much louder than the previous mortar-shells. A column of black smoke atop a dome of fire rose over the edge of the cliff, over the barely-visible wall of the fort beyond. Red dots trailing smoke and sparks shot skyward, and heavier debris tumbled briefly into sight.
secondary explosion, Center said. gun bay three, frontal sector to the right of the main gates.
Then something much heavier went off. Shards of rock as big as dogs quivered loose from the cliff, and the noise thumped at his face.
Raj nodded, wheezing back his breath. A fragment of red-hot iron slicing into a bagged charge . . . ripple effect. Massive guns flipping out into the air, and pieces of the crews with them. Chunks of rock and concrete blasting in all directions.
A yell went up from the sandbagged mortar enclosure. Nobody noticed along the sides of the ship for an instant. There was a final snarling fury of shots fired with the muzzles touching flesh and bayonet clashing on swords. The enemy fell back, realizing by instinct that there were too few of them to push home their attack. They saw the pillar of fire as they retreated, and ran.
Then the crew and soldiers were cheering too; another trio of mortar shells puffed upwards, and the sound of their firing slapped back from the cliffs like the applause of giants.
"Cease fire, riflemen," Raj croaked, keeping well down—the marksmen among the tumbled boulders could shoot again now, with their own men dead or out of the way. Lodoviko looked up from bandaging a gash in his hairy thigh and hooted laughter; Raj nodded.
"Ser?" the platoon sergeant said. "We could git sommat more of 'em—"
"No," Raj said. He remembered the man standing in the water, waiting while others climbed to safety over him. Or at least out of reach of the tentacles. "I need men like that. All I can get."
as do i, raj whitehall, Center said. as do i.
Colonel Courtet had probably been a fine figure of a man, back before twenty years of inactivity and Sala brandy took their toll; the vast bush of beard that hid his face was probably a mercy. He hadn't been drinking recently, but that probably only worsened the trembling of his liver-spotted hands. His body was large and soft, straining against the silvered armor he wore, and his dog shifted as if sensing its rider's unease.
"Colonel Gerrin Staenbridge," the Civil Government officer said, saluting crisply.
The other man's reply was a vague wave followed by silence. Gerrin was in no particular hurry, within reason. The two parties were meeting under a white flag in the cleared no-man's-land in front of the fort, which gave a wonderful view of the tumbled ruin of the main defensive bastion beside the gate. Eroded-looking stumps stood up above rubble that had filled in the moat and made a perfect ramp up into Fort Wager. In fact, it even looked accessible on dogback. Every minute that Courtet had to watch it from this angle was a blow struck at his morale, which looked none too steady to begin with. According to the intelligence, he'd been pushed forward by the local military council because he was the only officer of sufficient birth and rank who wasn't as defeatist as Colonel Boyce.
As completely defeatist as Boyce. Senior officers with military ability or ambition didn't come to Stern Isle.
Besides, Courtet's aide was worth a little attention: he looked the way a noble Military Government warrior was supposed to in the legends and so rarely did in practice. Twenty, broad in the shoulders and narrow in the hips, regular bronzed features and tourmaline eyes, long blond hair flowing to his shoulders and close-trimmed barley-colored beard. Uniform of beautiful materials, elegantly understated, but the breastplate commendably hacked, battered and lead-splashed.
Gerrin fought down a friendly smile; besides, Bartin was acting as his aide. The senior officer, a junior, and a bannerman, as was traditional.
"There's no point in wasting time," Staenbridge went on, when it was plain Courtet would not speak. Possibly could not. "You're getting the third and last chance to surrender."
"Ah . . ." Courtet coughed rackingly. "Same terms?" He wet his lips, visibly thirsty. Out of the corner of his eye, Gerrin could see the fine-drawn lip of the Brigadero aide curl.
"Of course not," Staenbridge snapped. "You know the laws of war concerning fortified places, colonel. We summoned you first when we invested the fort, and again before we commenced firing. Terms become more strict with each refusal."
He pointed with a gauntleted hand. "Now we've put a workable breach in your defenses. If you refuse and we storm the position, your lives are forfeit. And believe me, if you force us to take unnecessary casualties, we'll throw any survivors over the cliffs and their families will be turned over to the men. Who will not be in a gentle mood."
Courtet looked from one Civil Government officer to the other, from the dark suave face of a killer to the cheerful, handsome young man with the razor-edged steel hook for a left hand. The flower tucked behind his ear made the sight worse, not better.
"What terms, gentlemen?" he said hoarsely.
"Personal liberty for your families. All able-bodied males and their households to be sent to East Residence, men to be enrolled in our forces under the usual provisions—no service against the Brigade. The remainder to be released after giving their parole never to bear arms against the Civil Government. Personal property except arms to be retained by the owners, and officers' sidearms and dogs for those discharged. Forfeiture of real property beyond one house and forty hectares. And if that seems harsh, messers, consider the alternatives."
"Can I, ah, consult with my officers?"
"With this gentleman and no others." Although I wouldn't mind consulting with him myself, under other circumstances. "Are you in command, Colonel Courtet or not?"
Probably not but he could lead his men in the obvious direction. There was nothing more demoralizing than being shelled without a chance to reply, except possibly knowing your family was there with you. The blond aide drew Courtet aside and whispered urgently in his ear.
When he turned back, the Brigade commander's face was like gelid fat. His aide dismounted and helped him to the ground; they both drew their swords and offered them hilt-first across their forearms.
A huge roaring cheer rose from the Civil Government troops downslope, in their hasty fieldworks. Even with the mortars in support, taking the fortress would enact a big enough butcher's bill to daunt anyone. The fort's ramparts were black with watchers as well, and the sound that came up from them was a long hollow groan, the sort of noise you hear on a battlefield after dark when the wounded lie out. Calling for water, or their mothers, or in wordless pain.
The Civil Government officers each took his counterpart's blade, flourished it overhead, and returned it. Then Staenbridge pulled out his watch.
"My felicitations on an honorable but difficult decision," which you should have made yesterday, you butchering moron. "Colonel Courtet. Your men will march out within twenty minutes and stack arms," he said, "or you'll be in violation of the truce. Colonel, you'll remain with me until that's done. Sooner begun, the sooner we can get the wounded attended to and your women and children settled."
Courtet nodded heavily, resting one hand on the saddle of the dog beside him.
"Where's Whitehall?" he burst out.
The two Descotters looked at him expressionlessly. He blinked, and amended: "Where's Messer General Whitehall? They say," the Brigadero went on, "the demons fight for him. I could believe that."
"General Whitehall is where he thinks best," Staenbridge said. And I violently disagree; he should be here, and I on that boat. "And the holy Avatars fight for him, Colonel. He is the Sword of the Spirit of Man—hadn't you heard?"
Courtet was silent but his aide bowed courteously. "I had heard that, sir," he said, in fair if slow Sponglish. "We yield our swords to the might of the Spirit, then, to take them up again against Its enemies, heathen and Muslim." He turned and spurred for the gates.
They opened, and remained that way. A squad came forward to put Courtet under guard; Bartin Foley murmured to the lieutenant in charge, and a table, chair and tumbler of brandy appeared. The fat old man in too-tight armor looked at them and then put his face in his hands, his shoulders heaving.
Staenbridge heeled his dog off to one side. Bartin leaned toward him.
"You said that as if you meant it," the younger man said. "About Messer Raj being the Sword of the Spirit; and here I thought you were a sceptic."
"I find myself growing less sceptical, comrade of my heart. Less sceptical than I would wish."
"Envious?" Bartin grinned.
Gerrin Staenbridge shuddered elaborately and began stripping off his gloves. "Merciful Avatars—if there are any—no! Plenty of fame in being one of the selfless, faithful Companions, as I don't doubt the lying histories will call us all, forgetting we're each the central characters of our own stories." He thought for a moment, watching the screeching gulls and cawing dactosauroids over the harbor.
"Bad enough to be a hero, and carry the burdens of human expectations. To shoulder those of Something Else . . . even a soul like Raj's will crack under the burden in the end. No matter that all of us do what we can to help."
He looked at the younger officer and smiled. "The flower's charming, by the way. And since it's on the left today . . . ?"