“Give ’em hell, boys!” he screamed. “Give ’em hell! Twenty minutes—we have to hold them for twenty minutes!”
He might as well have asked for twenty years, he told himself bitterly. The regimental reserve was supposed to reach 2nd Company’s positions within twenty minutes of a serious heretic attack, but that was in daylight.
And when there are no Shan-wei-damned heretics in the way, he added bitterly as he heard a sudden outbreak of riflefire from his extreme left.
He stood upright in his lizardhole, craning his neck, and cursed viciously as the blinding rakurai of muzzle flashes swept across the roadway north of Seventy-Foot Hill. More riflefire flared and flashed farther down the hill, its deadly beauty marking the firing lines of 2nd Company’s other platoons, but the heretics had already cut the road. Now that flank of their attack was wheeling away from the hill. The bastards were settling in between 2nd Company and the rest of the regiment, and—
Something sizzled past his left ear and he dropped back down into the hole, punching its side with a despairing fist. If the heretics succeeded in cutting that road, or even simply prevented the reserve from using it.…
* * *
First Platoon swept up the slope in a grim, purposeful wave without firing a single shot to pinpoint its men in the dark.
Unlike any other army—even the RDA, which had become one of the best armies in Safeholdian history—the Imperial Charisian Army very seldom told its junior officers how to do their jobs. It trained them exhaustively, taught them a common doctrine, put them through the most demanding field problems it could come up with. But when it came to actually using that training, it told them what they were supposed to do, not how. They were responsible for understanding their superiors’ intentions and then accomplishing them. In the process, they were supposed to think for themselves and be perfectly willing to adapt, improvise, and overcome as they went along, and those same expectations extended downward to their sergeants, corporals, and even privates.
That was why the ICA was prepared to attack even in darkness, when no other army could risk the loss of cohesion—the loss of control—night attacks entailed. Few of their opponents—not even Allayn Maigwair, who’d turned out to be a far better military thinker than anyone in Charis would have believed before the Charisians encountered the Army of God—truly understood that. To them, loss of control equaled chaos, and the Temple Guard had understood long before anyone ever heard of the Army of God that no organized force was ever outnumbered by a disorganized mob. But 1st Platoon, 4th Company, 8th Regiment, 4th Infantry Brigade, Imperial Charisian Army, wasn’t disorganized. It was simply decentralized into its individual squads … and the farthest thing from a mob imaginable.
“Keep moving! Keep moving!” Corporal Zherald Tohmys bellowed as the blinding blink lizards of Dohlaran riflefire sparkled against the black backdrop of the hillside. He reached out, grabbed Haarahld Kyngsfyrd’s web gear, and dragged the stumbling 3rd Squad private back up off his knees. “Climb the frigging hill, damn it! Don’t kiss it!”
Ahead of him, the first grenades exploded.
* * *
“On the left!” someone screamed. “They’re coming up on the—!”
The warning died, turned into a keening wail of agony in the ear-shattering explosion of a heretic hand-bomb.
The hillside was a hellscape of darkness stabbed through by lightning bolts of riflefire, thunderclaps of grenades, shouts of warning, or command, or simple fury.
Second Platoon was dying, but it was dying hard, and Ahmbrohs Tyrnyr swung towards the warning shout, bringing up the revolver he’d taken from a dead heretic in a two-handed grip and cocking the hammer. He had only twenty cartridges for it, but while they lasted …
There! He saw movement, a shape silhouetted against the flickering glare of explosions and muzzle flashes. A shape that was moving, when every one of his men knew to stay put in his lizardhole in the dark—that the rest of the platoon would assume anyone who wasn’t in his hole was a heretic.
The revolver roared, and he’d remembered the first rule of a firefight in the dark and closed his eyes the instant before the trigger broke to avoid the blinding eruption of his own muzzle flash. He opened them again, just as quickly, and saw another shape moving to the left of the first. Or maybe it was the first, and he’d missed. It didn’t matter. He swung the muzzle, cocked the hammer, squeezed. The revolver thundered again, and he reopened his eyes, searching desperately for another target, knowing his muzzle flashes had marked his position for any heretic in the vicinity.
Something moved at the corner of his vision. He twisted towards it, bringing the revolver around, lifting the muzzle, and grunted in explosive agony as the fourteen-inch bayonet drove all the way through his left shoulder. He slammed back against the rear wall of his lizardhole and squeezed the trigger.
The range was less than three feet. The bullet struck its target with almost eight-hundred-foot-pounds of energy, and a deeper, more personal darkness smashed the lieutenant under as the man he’d just killed toppled into the lizardhole and a steel helmet hit him in the face like a piledriver.
.XII.
Army of the Seridahn HQ,
Kraisyr,
Duchy of Thorast,
Kingdom of Dohlar.
“How bad is it, Fahstyr?” Pairaik Metzlyr’s voice was very quiet.
He stood with Sir Fahstyr Rychtyr, Colonel Ahskar Mohrtynsyn, and General Clyftyn Rahdgyrz in the office Rychtyr had appropriated from the town of Kraisyr’s mayor, staring down at the map covering the mayor’s desk. There was no one else in the office—at the moment—but urgent voices could be heard through its open door and no doubt another of the general’s clerks would turn up momentarily with fresh tidings of disaster.
“I’m afraid it’s about as bad as it gets, Father,” Rychtyr said heavily.
He kept his own voice down, for the same reason his intendant had, but his gray eyes met Metzlyr’s gaze without flinching. Then he straightened, running one hand through his graying, sandy hair and sighed.
“They’ve not only cut the road, they’ve taken both the Saiksyn Farm and Cahrswyl’s Farm,” he said, his worn face grim. “That gives them control of the road from Cahrswyl’s to Kraisyr … and of the only solid ground between the road and the swamp.” He shook his head. “I can’t put the front back together, Father. Not before they cut the Waymeet-Fronzport High Road, anyway. And according to Brigadier Byrgair, their right flank’s less than ten miles from the Bryxtyn-Shan High Road right now.”
“It may be that close, Sir, but it hasn’t reached the damned road yet,” General Rahdgyrz rasped. The one-armed general’s eyes—well, his left eye; the right one was covered by a black eye patch—was very dark in a lean, strong-nosed face.
“No, no it hasn’t, Clyftyn,” Rychtyr agreed, smiling at the tall, narrow-shouldered general whose long black hair spilled down his back in a thick, old-fashioned braid. That braid was matched by a flowing beard that covered his chest, as if a stained-glass seijin from the War Against the Fallen had returned to take up his sword once more, and the image was more than skin deep.