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"Yes, Sir!"
The hummer-handler opened the smaller cage in which he had set aside the hummer with the release order already recorded. Now he took the small, fiercely aggressive little creature in his hands, whispered something to it, and tossed it into the air. Its wings blurred into invisibility, and it turned like a questing hound, hovering in midair. Then, sudden as a snapping arbalest string, it flashed away.
Toralk watched it disappear and fought down an urge to inhale deeply and surreptitiously. He remained far from certain that continuing the attack was the right move, but that no longer really mattered. First, because it wasn't his decision; secondly, because everyone was committed now. Commander of One Hundred Surtel Kormas would release his gryphons five minutes after he received Toralk's dispatch, and the gryphons' onslaught would be the signal for the rest of the assault.
Graholis, I hope this works, the thousand thought fervently. Please let this work!
"Regiment-Captain!"
Rof chan Skrithik turned quickly back to Janaki. Something had changed in the prince's voice. The fort's commander couldn't quite identify what that change was, but whatever it was, it sent a fresher, deeper surge of anxiety through him.
"Yes, Your Highness?"
"It's starting." Janaki turned to look at him, and the distant focus in his eyes was deeper and darker than ever. "Listen to me," he said, and there was a stark edge of command in his voice. "I don't know how much time there'll be. It won't be enough, however much of it there is. So it's important. Listen to what I tell you."
"Of course, Your Highness." Chan Skrithik was puzzled. Of course anything Prince Janaki had to tell him was "important." Did Janaki think chan Skrithik would have allowed him to stand up here, Chief- Armsman chan Braikal or not, if it wasn't important?
"I can't tell yet," Janaki sounded far more frustrated. "I can't tell which is the real attack yet."
He wheeled back around, staring out across the parapet. Then his head tilted back. He looked up into the sky above the fort, his head swinging from side to side.
"Not yet," he told the bright, cloudless heavens in a strange tone which mingled command and entreaty in almost equal measure. "Not yet!"
For a moment, nothing else happened. Then his falcon launched from his shoulder with a high, fierce cry, and he sucked in a deep breath.
"They're coming!" His arm shot out and he pointed sharply to the northwest. "There!"
Fifty Fahrlo watched the strike gryphons go streaking past the transports and his escorting battle dragons. The gryphons were far smaller, tiny, compared to the dragons, but there were over a hundred of them, and he was delighted that they were at least a thousand feet higher than his own formation. Fahrlo had a lively respect for the men who worked as gryphon-handlers. He trusted their professionalism implicitly, yet he'd seen what gryphons could do, and he wanted no part of it. If the compulsion spells failed, or if those spells misidentified the gryphons' target, enough of them could swarm even a dragon out of the heavens.
This time, though, there was no mistake. The gryphons swept onward, driving towards the smokegouting fort like a plague of pony-sized locusts, and Fahrlo smiled thinly behind his visor.
Should've let them swarm the bastards in the first place, he thought, even though he knew precisely why it hadn't seemed necessary. I bet they won't like this one little bit!
"Sir, I think—yes!" The lookout floating on his levitation spell at the end of the long tether to his saddle shouted down to Commander of Five Hundred Gyras Urlan. "The gryphons are in position!"
"Good!" Urlan barked. "Now get your ass back down here!"
"Yes, Sir!"
"Bugler!"
"Yes, Sir?"
"Blow 'Walk'!"
"Yes, Sir!"
The bugle began to sound, and the big, heavily augmented horses of the Seventh Zydor Heavy Dragoons stirred into movement. They had a long way to go, and so they moved without haste. The time for that would come, but it wasn't here yet. Not yet. They were bigger—much bigger—then the light cavalry's unicorns, and despite their augmentation, that meant they were slower, with less endurance, as well.
Their speed and strength had to be conserved for the final dash to their objective. But that was all right.
The gryphons wouldn't attack immediately. The compulsion spells directing their strike had been carefully structured to give Urlan's cavalry time to get into position.
The heavy horses' larger size meant each of them could carry not one rider, but two, and two of Urlan's hundred-and-twenty-strong companies were configured as standard heavy dragoons. Each horse bore a two-man saddle, with the rear rider armed not with a saber or lance but with a cutdown version of an infantry-dragon. It was much shorter ranged than the infantry weapon, but longer ranged than any arbalest and far more deadly.
Each horse in Commander Of One Hundred Orkal Kiliron's Charlie Company, on the other hand, carried only a standard saddle, instead of the two-man heavy dragoon version. In place of the normal second rider, a smaller version of the standard dragon cargo pod had been harnessed to each horse. Its comparatively diminutive size was small enough for an augmented horse to handle without too much trouble, but still big enough to carry a full twelve-man infantry squad. A quarter of those pods were occupied by Gifted engineering specialists; the others contained over a thousand picked infantry. And one basis for their selection was that at least half of them had at least some Gift.
Enough, at any rate, for them to be armed with daggerstones for the assault.
"Activate the glamour," Urlan said to the Gifted commander of fifty at his side.
"Yes, Sir."
"That's it."
Janaki's voice was suddenly calm, almost quiet, and chan Skrithik jerked his eyes away from the small dots, circling above Fort Salby with a hungry eagerness he could sense even from here. They seemed very close, those dots, but if they were the size the prince had described, then they were much higher than they looked.
"I beg your pardon, Your Highness?"
"I See now," Janaki said, and turned his back on the circling dots to face the regiment-captain with a strangely serene little smile. "I didn't think there was going to be enough time."
"Your Highness?" Something about Janaki's voice, the way his body language had somehow relaxed, worried chan Skrithik.
"Listen." Janaki put his hands on chan Skrithik's shoulders, pulling the older man so close to him their foreheads almost touched. "The eagle-lions are going to attack in just a few minutes. They'll come in from the west. When they do, we'll see the dragons coming in behind them."
The prince's words came quickly, with a sort of distant urgency. Chan Skrithik might have been fooled by their quietness, but he saw something behind the ghosts in those gray eyes. He saw ferocious purpose, determination, and his own eyes narrowed with the intensity of his concentration on what Janaki was saying.
"They'll have infantry on the dragons. Some of the dragons will be spitting fire or lightning. They'll have more infantry on lines, ready to drop over the parapet. They'll use the eagle-lions to try to suppress our fire. But the dragons aren't the real threat. They're a diversion, Regiment-Captain. They want us looking at them while the real attack comes in from behind us, from the east. Do you understand? The dragons and their infantry are the diversion, not the cavalry. Do you understand?"
Chan Skrithik nodded, and Janaki looked past him for a moment at Senior-Armsman Isia.
"Warn Company-Captain Mesaion. The cavalry have some sort of ... spell. It's like a smokescreen, but different. It'll look more like a mirage—like heat shimmer. But the cavalry will be behind it. Most of the men won't be able to see through it, but chan Forcal can. He's got to get Mesaion's first rounds on target
—on the ranks around their standard. It's a wind sock, like one of the Arpathian dragon-standards. That's where their commander is—where the spell will be coming from. Do understand?"
Isia darted a look at chan Skrithik. The regiment-captain nodded, and the Flicker swallowed hard, then produced a jerky nod of his own.
"Yes. Yes, Your Highness!"
Janaki's head swiveled back to chan Skrithik while Isia's frenzied pencil started scribbling the message to Mesaion. The black dots overhead were begi
"They've got those fire-throwers on some of the horses. And some of the others are towing carriers—
floating carriers, like hot-air balloons—with more infantry in them. They'll try to get the carriers in close enough to assault the parapet—use them like scaling ladders. And if they can't get over the wall, they'll go through it. They've got people with spells that can open breaches—like blasting charges, but different. They'll have to reach the wall to actually use them. They'll try for the dead spot at the southeast corner, where the fire will cover them and none of the machine guns or pedestal guns will bear. You have to get men with grenades over there now. Do you understand?"
Chan Skrithik felt himself nodding again as Janaki repeated the three-word question like some sort of mantra.
"See to it, Chief," he said to chan Braikal. The Marine stared at him for one instant, then turned almost agonized eyes to Janaki. He hesitated a heartbeat longer, but the crown prince gave him a smile and twitched his head, confirming chan Skrithik's order, and chan Braikal thundered off, shouting for the other members of his platoon.
"Some of the infantry have the same sort of smaller fire-throwers," Janaki went on, the machine-gun words coming with almost impossible clarity yet simultaneously seeming to trip and fall over one another. "If the ones with the blasting charges touch the wall, they'll blow through it. The fire-throwers have less range than a revolver, but they'll kill anyone they hit and each of them is good for several shots. And they've got other people with them—people with spells like a Lifter's, only better. They can actually Lift people up over the parapet without using ladders or the carriers if they can get close enough."