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“Malagor and Lord Sean!” the Twelfth’s commander bellowed, and his men howled the high, terrible Malagoran yell and sprang into a full run.
A curtain of flame blasted out from the wall, twenty guns spewing grapeshot into a packed formation at a range of barely three hundred meters. Hundreds of men went down as quarter-kilo buckshot smashed through them, but other men hurdled their shattered bodies at a dead run, and their speed took them in under the artillery’s maximum depression before the gu
Massive, broken timbers collapsed under the impact of hurtling bodies and plunged downward, crushing dozens of men and pi
The Twelfth drove onward, carried by a blood-mad fury beyond sanity and driven by the weight of numbers behind them, and a storm of musket fire met them as they slammed through the third and final gate at last. Arlaks bellowed, blasting them with case shot at less than sixty meters, and men slipped and fell on blood-slick stone as the brigade broke out into the open. Men fired their rifles on the run, still charging forward, and slammed into the waiting pikes like a bleeding, dying hammer.
The impact staggered the Guardsmen. Their longer weapons gave them a tremendous advantage in this headlong clash, but the Malagorans rammed onward, and more and more of them swept out of the tu
More Malagorans charged through the gate tu
The Guard’s officers did everything mortal men could do, but mortal men couldn’t stop that frenzied charge, and what had begun slowly spread and accelerated. A stubborn withdrawal became first a retreat, then a rout, and the Malagorans swarmed over any man who tried to stand while others fought their way meter by bloody meter up the stairs on the wall’s i
Two hundred of the Twelfth Brigade were still on their feet to join it.
“We’re through the gate, Lord Sean!” Tibold shouted into the com. “We’re through the gate!”
“I know, Tibold.” Sean closed his eyes, and tears streaked his face, for he was tied into Brashan’s orbital arrays. The smoke and chaos made it impossible to sort out details from orbit, even for Imperial optics, but he didn’t need details to know thousands of his men lay dead or wounded.
“Watch it, Tibold!” Harriet’s voice cut into the circuit. “The men you routed just ran into their reinforcements. You’ve got ten or twenty thousand fresh troops coming at you, and the survivors from the gates are rallying behind them!”
“Let them come!” the ex-Guardsman exulted. “We hold the gate now. They can’t keep us out, and I’ll take them in a straight fight any day, Lady Harry!”
“Sean, you’ve got more men coming at you, too,” Harriet warned.
“I see ’em, Harry.”
“Hang on, Lord Sean!” Tibold said urgently.
“We will,” Sean promised grimly, and opened his eyes. “Pass the word, Folmak. They’re coming in from the east and west.”
“What’s happening, Lord Marshal?” Vroxhan demanded edgily as a panting messenger handed Surak a message. The lord marshal sca
“The heretics have carried the gates, Holiness.”
“God will strengthen our men,” Vroxhan promised.
“I hope you’re right, Holiness,” Surak said grimly. “High-Captain Therah reports the heretics took at least two thousand casualties, and they’re still driving forward, not even pausing to regroup. It would seem,” he faced the high priest squarely, “their outrage at our treachery is even greater than I’d feared.”
“We acted in the name of God, Lord Marshal!” Vroxhan snapped. “Do not dare presume to question God’s will!”
“I didn’t question His will,” Surak said with dangerous emphasis. “I only observe that men enraged by betrayal can accomplish things other men ca
“Then they’ll be heavy!” Vroxhan glared at him, then slammed his fist on a map of the Temple with a snarl. “What of the heretic leaders?”
“A fresh attack is going in now, Holiness.”
The ordnance depot’s stone wall was for security, not serious defense. Two wide gateways pierced it to north and south, but Folmak’s men had loopholed the wall, barricaded the gates with paving stones and artillery limbers, and wheeled captured arlaks into place to fire out them. It wasn’t much of a fort, but it was infinitely preferable to trying to stand in the streets or squares of the city.
The surviving Guardsmen of the original ambush surrounded the depot, reinforced by several thousand more men and four batteries of arlaks. Now their guns moved up along side streets that couldn’t be engaged from the gateways. The Guard’s gu
Sean saw it coming, but there was nothing he could do to prevent it. Ammunition parties had hauled cases of Guard musket balls out of the depot and issued them to his men, who had orders to use the smoothbore ammunition for close range fighting and conserve their rifle ammunition, and he stood in a window of the depot commander’s office and watched stone dust and wooden splinters fly from the warehouse walls as picked marksmen fired on the small targets the improvised gunports offered. Some of their shots were going home, and no doubt at least a few were actually hitting someone, but not enough to stop the enemy’s preparations.