"Mother Jambakol!"
Five Hundred Urlan spat the filthy curse as still more rifles began to fire, this time from ground level.
His head whipped around, and his eyes narrowed as he saw the infantrymen. They were firing furiously, although with nowhere near the accuracy of the men on top of the wall.
For a moment, Urlan considered sending one of his dragoon companies to scatter them, but he quickly decided against it. They weren't hitting very many of his own men, and when the Zydors reached their objective, the fort itself would cover them against these new Sharonians' fire. They'd lose more men charging them than they would simply galloping straight into the waiting cover.
Chief-Armsman chan Braikal watched Arcanans dropping under his platoon's aimed fire. The mortar fire continued to rake their ranks, as well, but it wasn't going to be enough to keep them from reaching the wall, and they were going to run in under the mortars' effective arc of fire when they got a bit closer. His Marines weren't scoring as many hits as they should have been, either. Was that from excitement and too much adrenaline, he wondered? Or could it be that the bastards had some other spell protecting them?
Not something that could make them invisible, perhaps, but something that made them harder to hit?
He didn't know, and it didn't matter. What mattered was that at least some of them were going to make it to the base of the wall after all, and Prince Janaki and Regiment-Captain chan Skrithik were counting on chan Braikal to keep them out of Fort Salby.
"Chan Yaran!"
"Yes, Chief?" Petty-Armsman Rokal chan Yaran, whose promotion had come through less than two weeks before, replied.
"Get your grenade party ready!"
"Yes, Chief!"
Windlord Garsal had suddenly become the senior officer in the infantry and artillery positions protecting the western approaches to Fort Salby. It was not, he discovered, a position he particularly wanted.
Unfortunately, it was his.
Sunlord Markan's decision to personally lead the one company they'd retained as an immediate reserve struck Garsal as quixotic, at the very least. Nonetheless, he'd obeyed the sunlord's orders and his Flicker had sent out the orders that stripped an entire battalion out of its positions and sent them thudding across the barren, dusty earth in Markan's wake.
Which left Garsal to deal with the minor matter of what looked like at least two or three hundred dragons headed straight for him.
And they're the diversion, are they?
The thought flashed through his brain, and for the first time in his life, he found himself devoutly hoping all the tall tales and legends about the Calirath Talent were actually accurate. Because, if they weren't ... .
He watched them coming on, and as he did, another thought occurred to him.
They may be supposed to be a diversion. In fact, I'll bet they are. They'd have followed closer behind those eagle-lions if this were a serious attack. But it looks like they may not have realized just how long ranged our artillery really is.
His smile was thin and feral as the huge dragons swooped and wove their intricate patterns. There was an awful lot of motion up there, but they weren't actually advancing all that quickly, and he looked at his Flicker once again.
"Message to the artillery. Prepare to load with shrapnel ... but don't set the fuses until I give the order to fire."
Five Hundred Urlan's lead dragoons reached the foot of the fortress wall. The rear troopers leaned back, triggering their cutdown infantry-dragons, sending blasts of intolerable heat rolling up the outer face of the wall. A Sharonian who'd leaned out to fire down upon them shrieked horribly and plunged from the parapet, trailing fire like a human meteor. Others ducked back, cowering away from the searing fury.
But still others had been waiting.
Urlan saw the small objects plunging down from above, and his stomach tightened. He didn't know what the godsdamned things were, but he was certain he was about to find out.
Chan Braikal heard the hand grenades exploding even through the thunder of the rest of the battle, and his eyes glittered with cold satisfaction as he listened to the screams from below. The bastards were too close to the wall for the artillery to drop on them any longer, but chan Yaran's grenades were obviously a different matter. Yet even as they exploded, the blasts of heat and fury continued to roar up from below, as well.
He looked out across the parapet, wondering if he had any eyebrows left, and swore with fresh inventiveness as he saw the floating ... whatever-the-hell-they-were. He didn't know what to call them.
They looked for all the world like some sort of airborne boats, towed by the massive horses to which they were tethered. But whatever they were, they floated even higher than Fort Salby's walls, and they were packed to the gunwales with Arcanans, some of whom obviously had fire-throwers of their own.
His men had the advantage of better cover, the fort's adobe had already proven itself virtually immune to the blast effect of the Arcanan fireballs, and the mortars could still reach the tow horses. Unfortunately, chan Braikal and the other defenders on the wall were also outnumbered by somewhere around ten-toone, and when one of the fireballs did find a chink in the parapet, it killed or wounded four or five of his people at once.
Chan Yaran and his squad were still chucking hand grenades over the edge as quickly as they could pull the pins, and chan Braikal had another squad doing nothing but protect the grenadiers. Which left him only three squads—less than thirty men, with the casualties he'd already taken—to hold off at least eight or nine hundred Arcanans in those floating boats.
It was not a winning proposition, even for Imperial Ternathian Marines.
Five Hundred Urlan grimaced in satisfaction as Charlie Company finally came up with the infantry assault force.
His two lead companies had taken at least thirty percent casualties, but they'd also managed to suppress a lot of the defensive fire. Now Kiliron's troopers had managed—not without taking serious losses of their own—to get close enough they were sheltered from the Sharonians' artillery fire by the wall itself, and that meant the infantry could damned well take over!
Chan Braikal felt someone pounding on his shoulder. He turned his head and found himself looking into Platoon-Captain Tarkel chan Noth's blue eyes.
"How bad, Chief?!" chan Noth shouted in the Marine's ear, pointing downward to indicate the ground at the foot of the wall.
"I think we've got the first batch of bastards pinned—sort of, at least!" chan Braikal shouted back, then pointed out at the approaching "air boats." More and more fire was beginning to come from them, and chan Noth ducked as a fireball exploded just below the edge of the parapet directly in front of him.
"But if we don't stop that, Sir, we're fucked!" chan Braikal added ... quite unnecessarily, he was certain.
"Then it's a good thing I brought this!"
Chan Braikal turned his head and saw a three-gun section of Faraika I machine guns setting up with frantic haste.
"Mother Jambakol!" Urlan snarled again as the distinctive, ripping-cloth sound of one of the Sharonians accursed "machine guns" crackled above him. He whipped his head around in time to see splinters flying from two of the closer personnel pods as the Sharonians flayed them with fire. Then, suddenly, one of them plunged to shatter on the ground below as one of the Sharonian bullets either killed the Gifted engineer controlling the levitation spell or smashed the acumulater itself.
A second pod followed moments later, and the cavalry commander looked around quickly, then grunted as his eyes found what they'd been looking for.
"Fifty Rahndar!"
The dark-haired commander of fifty with the Engineers shoulder patch looked around sharply at the sound of his name.
"Yes, Sir!"
"I want a godsdamned hole, Fifty," Urlan snarled, jabbing a finger at the fort wall, "and I want it right fucking now!"
Rahndar darted a quick, anxious glance up the wall to where those infernal explosive devices were plunging down and swallowed hard. Apparently, however, the thought of being blown apart was less daunting than whatever he'd just seen in Urlan's eyes.
"Yes, Sir!"
Rahndar reined his horse around and started shouting for the rest of his engineering section.
Chan Braikal was just beginning to feel a certain cautious optimism when the world went crazy.