"They're not making much practice against this redoubt," he said.
"Told you," Teodore said with pardonable smugness.
Ingreid barked laughter and thumped him on the back; the glove rang on his backplate with a dull bong.
"This time we're the ones pissing on 'em from above," Ingreid said. He took the telescope from his subordinate and adjusted it. "How long will it take?"
"We're at extreme range," Teodore said. "Wouldn't work at all without-" he stamped a heel "-a hundred meters of hill under us. With a dozen guns, and overcharging the loads-four, five days to bring down a stretch of wall."
"And we've got their supplies cut off, too," Ingreid said happily. His teeth showed yellow in a grin. "Slow-motion fighting, but you two have been doing well. When the wall comes down. ."
"Don't like to put everything in one basket," Teodore said.
The older men laughed. "We've got another bullet in that revolver," Carstens said. "They'll all be looking this way-the best time to buttfuck 'em."
CHAPTER TEN
"I'll bloody well leave, that's what I'll do," Cabot Clerett snarled, pacing the room. It was small and delicately furnished, lit by a single lamp. The silk hangings stirred slightly as he passed, wafting a scent of jasmine.
"Cabot, you can't leave in the middle of a campaign; not when your career has begun so gloriously!" Suzette said.
"Whitehall obviously won't let me out of his sight again," Cabot said. "He doesn't make mistakes twice. And all he's doing is sitting here. I'll go back and tell uncle the truth about him. Then I'll collect reinforcements, ten thousand extra men, and come back here and do it right."
"Cabot, you can't mean to leave me here?" Suzette said, her eyes large and shining.
"Only for a few months," he said, sitting beside her on the couch.
She seized his hand and pressed it to her breast. "Not even for a moment. Promise me you won't!"
* * *
"Let me out, my son," the priest said shortly.
"I'm no son of yours, you bald pimp in a skirt," the trooper growled. He was from the 1st Cruisers, a tall hulking man with a thick Namerique accent.
Savage, the priest thought. Worse than the Brigade, most of whom were at least minimally polite to the orthodox clergy.
The East Gate had a small postern exit, a narrow door in the huge main portal. A torch stood in a bracket next to it, and the flickering light caught on the rough wood and thick iron of the gate, cast shadows back from the towers on either side. A crackle of rifle-fire came from somewhere, perhaps a kilometer away. Faint shouting followed it; part of the continual cat-and-mouse game between besieger and besieged. Behind him Old Residence was mostly dark, the gasworks closed down for the duration as coal was conserved for heating and cooking. Lamps were few for the same reason, showing mellow gold against the blackness of night. The white puffs of the priest's breath reminded him to slow his breathing.
"I have a valid pass," he said, waving the document under the soldier's nose. There was a trickle of movement in and out of the city, since it was advantageous to both sides.
"Indeed you do," a voice said from behind him.
He whirled. A man stepped out of the shadow into the light of the torch; he was of medium height, broad-shouldered and deep-chested, with a swordsman's thick wrists. Much too dark for an ex-Squadrone, a hard square beak-nosed face with black hair cut in a bowl around his head. Major Tejan M'brust, the Descotter Companion who commanded the 1st Cruisers. The priest swallowed and extended the pass.
"Signed by Messa Whitehall, right enough," the officer said.
More of the 1st Cruiser troopers came out, standing around the cleric in an implacable ring. Their bearded faces were all slabs and angles in the torchlight; most still wore their hair long and knotted on the right side of their heads. He could smell the strong scent of sweat and dog and leather from them, like animals.
Another figure walked up beside M'brust and took the document. "Thank you, Tejan," she said. A small slender woman wrapped in a white wool cloak, her green eyes colder than the winter night. "Yes, I signed it. I did wonder why anyone would take the risk of leaving the city just to fetch a copy of the Annotations of the Avatar Sejermo. The man couldn't understand the plain sense of the Handbooks himself and he's been confusing others ever since."
The priest's hand made a darting motion toward his mouth. The troopers piled onto him, one huge calloused hand clamping around his jaw and the other hand ripping the paper out of his lips. He gagged helplessly, then froze as a bayonet touched him behind one ear.
Suzette Whitehall took the damp crumpled paper and held it fastidiously between one gloved finger and thumb. "In cipher," she said. "Of course." She held it to the light. The words were gibberish, but they were spaced and sized much like real writing. "A substitution code."
The relentless green gaze settled on him. Her expression was as calm as a statue, but the Descotter officer beside her was grinning like a carnosauroid. He threw back his cloak and held up one hand, with a pair of armorer's pliers in it, and clacked them.
The priest moistened his lips. "My person is inviolate," he said. "Under canon law, a priest-"
"The city is under martial law," Suzette said.
"Church law takes precedence!"
"Not in the Gubernio Civil, Reverend Father."
"I will curse you!"
The marble mask of Suzette's face gave a slight upward curve of the lips. Tejan M'brust laughed aloud.
"Well, Reverend Father," he said, "that might alarm ordinary soldiers. I really don't think my boys will much mind, seeing as they're all This Earth heretics."
The hands holding him clamped brutally as he struggled. "And," M'brust went on, "I'm just not very pious."
"Raj Whitehall is the Sword of the Spirit," Suzette said. "He is a pious man. . which is why I handle things like this for him." She turned her head to the soldiers. "Sergeant, take him into the guardhouse there. Get the fireplace going, and bring a barrel of water."
"Ya, mez," the man said in Namerique: yes, lady.
M'brust clacked his pliers once more, turning his wrist in obscene parody of a dancer with castanets. "They say priests have no balls," he said. "Shall we see?"
The priest began to scream as the soldiers pulled him into the stone-lined chamber, heels dragging over the threshold. The thick door clanked shut, muffling the shrieks.
Even when they grew very loud.
* * *
"Not much longer," Gerrin Staenbridge said.
The thick fabric of the tower shook under their feet. A section of the stone facing fell into the moat with an earthquake rumble. The rubble core behind the three-meter blocks was brick and stone and dirt, but centuries of trickling water had eaten pockets out of it. The next round gouged deep, and the whole fabric of the wall began to flex. Dust rose in choking clouds, hiding the bluffs two kilometers away. The sun was rising behind them, throwing long shadows over the cleared land ahead. The ragged emplacements along the bluffs were already in sunlight, gilded by it, and it was out of that light that the steady booming rumble of the siege guns sounded.
"Time to go," Raj agreed.
They walked to the rear of the tower and each stepped a foot into a loop of rope. The man at the beam unlocked his windlass.
"I'll play it out slow like," he said. "And watch yor step, sirs."
Gerrin smiled, teeth white in the shadow of the stone. When they had descended a little, he spoke.