Heirs of Empire

“Warn Harry and Stomald!” he snapped, and turned in the saddle. “Folmak!”

“Lord Sean?” Folmak’s face was perplexed. He couldn’t understand English, but he’d recognized their tones, and his combat instincts had quivered instantly to life.

“It’s a trap—they’re going to ambush us when we hit that square up ahead.” The captain paled, but Sean went on urgently. “We can’t go back. Our only chance is to go ahead and hope they don’t guess we know what’s coming. Drop back and pass the word. They’re still several streets over, keeping out of sight, and they’ll probably wait to close in until most of the column’s into the square, so here’s what we’re going to do—”

“A trap?” Tibold Rarikson stared at the Angel Harry in horror. She couldn’t be serious! But her strained face and the fear in her single eye told him differently. He stared at her for one more moment, then wheeled away, shouting for his officers.

High Priest Vroxhan smiled triumphantly as the heretics began entering the Place of Martyrs. He could just see the first Guardsmen moving into position, and other troops, invisible to him here, had closed the North Way far behind the demon-worshipers. So “Lord Sean” was a war captain without peer, was he? Vroxhan barked a laugh as he recalled Ortak’s whining warning.

If the heretics believe “Lord Sean” and “Lord Tamman” unbeatable, they’re about to learn differently! And let us see how their morale responds when we drag their accursed “angels’ ” champions to the Inquisition in chains!

His smile grew cruel as the heretics continued into the square. In just minutes, Lord Marshal Surak’s handpicked commanders would send their men forward and—

His smile died. The infidels had stopped advancing! They were— What were they doing?

“Form square! Form square!”

Under-Captain Harkah twisted around in disbelief as Sean’s amplified voice bellowed the command and whistles shrilled. Two companies of Folmak’s lead battalion—primed by quiet warnings from their officers—faced instantly to the left and right and marched directly away from one another. The rest of the regiment advanced another fifty meters, then spread across the growing space between them in a two-deep firing line. It wasn’t a proper square—more of a three-sided, hollow rectangle, short sides anchored on the north side of the Place of Martyrs—and it grew steadily as more men double-timed out of the North Way and slotted into position.

“Lord Sean!” the Guardsman cried. “What do you think—?!”

His question died as he suddenly found himself looking down the muzzle of Sean’s pistol at a range of fifteen centimeters.

“In about ten minutes,” Sean said in a deadly voice, “the Temple Guard is going to attack us. Are you trying to tell me you didn’t know?”

“Attack—?” Harkah stared at Sean in disbelief. “You’re mad!” he whispered. “High Priest Vroxhan himself swore to receive you as envoys!”

“Did he?” The muzzle of Sean’s pistol twitched like a pointer. “Is that his negotiating team?” he grated.

Harkah whipped around in the indicated direction, and his face went bone-white as the leading ranks of Guard pike companies suddenly appeared, filling every opening on the east, west, and south sides of the Place of Martyrs. There were thousands of them, and even as he watched, they flowed forward and fell into fighting formation.

“Lord Sean, I—” he began, then swallowed. “My God! The hostages! Bishop Corada! Uncle Kerist!”

“You mean you didn’t know?” Despite his fury, Sean found himself tempted to believe Harkah’s surprise—and fear for his uncle—were genuine.

“This is madness!” Harkah whipped back to Sean. “Madness! Even if it succeeds, it will do nothing to the rest of your army!”

“Maybe High Priest Vroxhan disagrees with you,” Sean said grimly.

“It can’t be His Holiness! He swore upon his very soul to protect you as his own people!”

“Well, someone wasn’t listening to him.” Sean’s voice was harsh, and he nodded to one of Folmak’s aides. The Malagoran rode up beside Harkah, and the Guard captain didn’t even turn his head as his pistols and sword were taken. “For the moment, Captain Harkah, I’ll assume you didn’t know this was coming,” Sean said flatly. “Don’t do anything to make me change my mind.”

Harkah only stared sickly at him, and Sean turned his branahlk and trotted into the center of his shallow square. He was too outnumbered to hold back a reserve; aside from individual squads to cover the smaller streets opening onto the Place of Martyrs in his rear, all three regiments of the First Brigade were in firing line, and the Guardsmen had paused. Even from here he could see their surprise at the speed with which the Malagorans had fallen into formation, and he swept his eyes over his own men.

“All right, boys! We’re in the shit, and the only way out is through those bastards over there! Are you with me?”

“Aye!” The answer was a hard, angry bellow, and he gri

“Fix bayonets!” Metal clicked all about him as bayonets glittered in the morning light. “No one fires until I give the word!” he shouted, and drew his sword. “Pipers, give ’em a tune!”

Vroxhan cursed in fury as the heretics snapped from an extended, vulnerable column into a compact, bayonet-bristling square in what seemed a single heartbeat. He’d seen the Guard at drill enough to recognize the lethal speed with which the demon-worshipers had reacted, and he snarled another curse at his own commanders for their hesitation. Why weren’t they charging? Why weren’t they closing with the heretics to finish them before they got set?

And then, clear in the stillness, he heard their accursed bagpipes wailing the song which had been ba

“Here they come!” Sean shouted as the Guard pikes swept down. “Wait for the word!”

“God wills it!”

The deep, bass thunder of the Guard’s battle cry roared its challenge, and the phalanx lunged forward in a column eighty men across and a hundred men deep. That formation wasn’t even a hammer; it was an unstoppable battering ram, hurled straight at the heart of Sean’s square in a forest of bitter pikeheads driven by the mass of eight thousand charging bodies. Something primitive and terrified gibbered deep within him with the sure and certain knowledge that it couldn’t be stopped, that it had to break through, shatter the formation that spelled survival, and he felt the pound of his heart and the fountains’ spray on his cheek as his eyes darted to where Sandy sat taut and silent on her own branahlk at his side. A terrible spasm of fear for the woman he loved twisted him, but he drove it down. He couldn’t afford it, and his eyes hardened and moved back to the oncoming enemy.

“All right, boys!” He raised his voice but kept it calm, almost conversational. “Let ’em get a little closer. Wait for it. Wait for it! Wait—” His brain whirred like a computer as the range dropped to two hundred meters, and then he rose in his stirrups and his sword slashed down.

“By platoons—fire!”

The sudden, stupendous concussion rocked the Temple, and a pall of smoke choked the morning. First Brigade had sixteen hundred men, a total of eighty platoons, in a line four hundred meters long and two ranks deep, and the standard reload time for Sean’s riflemen was seventeen seconds. But that was the minimum the drill sergeants demanded; an experienced man could do it in less under the right conditions of weather and motivation, and today, Folmak’s brigade did it in twelve. The fire and smoke started at the line’s extreme left and rolled down its face like the wrath of God, each platoon firing its own volley on the heels of its neighbor to the left; by the time the rolling explosion reached the line’s right end, the left end had already reloaded and the lethal ballet began afresh.