'What happened?' he cried. 'Where's our gods-damned explosion?'
'The Weavers,' said the Sister, her red eyes unfocused. 'Heart's blood. The Weavers got to the fuses before we could stop them. They slipped past us. A trick… a trick that we did not know they had.'
Yugi looked back at the bridge in horror, and finally the line broke and the Aberrants surged through. They spread like oil onto the south bank of the river, and there they began to kill.
TWENTY-SEVEN
'Destroy it!' Yugi cried. 'We need that bridge down!'
The Sister to whom he was addressing this barely heard him. She was already immersed in the effort to do just that. Though the fuses might have failed, the Sisters could detonate the explosives themselves easily enough; in fact, they could tear the bridge apart without the need for explosives at all. It had always been intended as another backup in a situation such as this.
But the Weavers had guessed how crucial the Sakurika was to the Empire's battle plan, and they had got there first. By spinning false images of themselves, they had duped the Sisters into thinking that all their opponents were accounted for, when in reality several of them were slipping unnoticed through the Weave to the bridge, where they found the explosives and choked their fuses. The Sisters had not expected such deftness and cooperation in their enemy, and it had cost them. Before they could react, the Weavers had stitched a defensive position around the bridge, abandoning their attempts to influence other parts of the battlefield in favour of consolidating there. The Sisters swarmed around them, probing at them, feinting and retreating, but they had meshed solid and they were impenetrable. The Sisters had met their match.
'We cannot,' said the Sister who stood near to Yugi. 'We cannot destroy it.'
Yugi swore, looking over the heads of the soldiers to where the Aberrants were carving bloody swathes into the ranks. Close in, the predators had the advantage of greater strength; the secret to victory lay in keeping them at a distance, where they could be hammered by mortars and fire-cannons. He glanced back at the hill where Lucia stood, but it was too dark to see her now.
What is she waiting for? he thought angrily. If those river spirits were the best she could do, then they were all doomed.
'The artillery,' Zahn said. 'They are making for the artillery.'
Yugi looked, and saw he was right. The Aberrants were cutting a path towards one of the hills where the artillery positions were steadily massacring Aberrants on the far side of the river. Their push was costing them dear, for it was exposing them to attacks from the flanks, but by sheer weight of numbers they were winning through.
A portion of the artillery had been turned toward the bridge now; through the Sisters, word had already spread about the failure of the explosives. But any shells that came near were plucked from the air by the Weavers and fell harmlessly into the river.
Yugi and Zahn looked at each other stonily. 'Defend the artillery,' Yugi said. 'I'll take back the bridge. We have to hold them on the north side.'
Zahn nodded. 'May Ocha and Shintu favour you,' he said, and then spurred his horse and rode away, accompanied by his bodyguard. Yugi could hear his rallying cry as he went, and other soldiers began to join him as he raced to intercept the enemy.
Yugi looked over his shoulder at Nomoru. 'Can you get a position on the riverbank to hit the explosives?'
'They're hidden under the bridge. And it's dark. Won't be easy,' Nomoru said. She slid down from the saddle behind him. 'I'll try.'
'Don't forget the Weavers. They can stop a rifle ball.'
'We will be ready,' said the Sister. 'They can intercept shells, but a rifle ball is smaller and faster. We could get it through.'
Nomoru shouldered her rifle, cast a disparaging glance at the painted woman, and then looked up at Yugi. Her eyes were flat.
His gaze flickered over the radial scars on the side of her face. 'I'll send up a signal rocket.' He patted his belt, from which hung a small and innocuous cylindrical tube. 'Don't hesitate.'
'I won't.'
They paused a moment longer. There was something left to be said, but neither would say it. Then Yugi spurred his horse towards the pennant of the Libera Dramach, which was raised near the mouth of the bridge.
As he forged through the troops, smelt the stink of sweat, of cured leather and blade oil and smoke and blood and death from upwind, he could not shed the feeling that he was dreaming all of this. The withdrawal from amaxa root – he had not had the opportunity to smoke any tonight – and the presence of the spirits charging the air suffused everything with a muffling haze. It seemed as if they were all complicit in some sort of game in which the stakes were trivial things instead of lives. He simply could not encompass the sheer number of people who would die here today, who had died already. This kind of slowly settling unreality had threatened him in the past, but he had never been a general in a battle of such scope before. War was too big for him, and his only defence was not to think about it at all.
He reached the pennant. Faces were upturned in the green wash of moonlight, looking to him. It seemed easier to do what he had to than to consider it any longer. He raised his sword and shouted:
'Libera Dramach! We're taking back the bridge!'
The roar of approval, full-throated and bestial, was loud enough to shock him. His senses sharpened, his blood began to pound, and the haze disappeared. Suddenly, he saw everything with an incredible clarity. The wind lashed against him, blowing the rag tied around his forehead like a streamer.
'Forward!'
The soldiers surged around him in an intoxicating wave, and he was borne along on its crest, unable to stop a fierce cry rising from his own lips. The ranks before them either parted or joined the charge. The Libera Dramach collided with the Aberrants in a brutal smash of bodies and blades.
Yugi was one of several mounted men, and they rode behind the leading edge with their rifles at their shoulders, using their height advantage to shoot the Aberrants at close range. He primed, fired, primed, fired, drawing the bolt on his weapon with fluid ease between each shot, controlling his mount with his knees. His shots smacked into their targets with shattering force, spewing ribbons of dark blood: a ghaureg went down with a hole in the side of its neck; a feyn took a neat headshot and went limp; he put three in the hump of a rampaging furie before he got something vital and killed it. He did not have time to think about anything but aiming and shooting until his rifle clicked dry and he was forced to break open the powder chamber and refill.
He was in the midst of doing so when there was a shove from the side, and his horse toppled into a group of men with a neigh of distress. Yugi's rifle fell from his hand as he fought for balance, but somehow his mount righted itself. Only long enough, however, for the ghaureg that had forced its way through the soldiers to grab the horse's head in both hands and break its neck with a sharp twist.
But it had chosen the wrong adversary of the two to attack first. Yugi's blade flew from its scabbard and he hacked downward with all his weight behind it. The ghaureg's arms were cut through at the elbows, and it flailed backward, roaring in pain, until someone drove a dagger into the glistening black nexus-worm in its neck.
Yugi did not see the demise of his opponent. He felt the tip of the horse as it went over, and tried to scramble free of the saddle. By good fortune, he managed to jump aside and tumble as the horse crashed down, and he fetched up against the legs of a soldier who dragged him to his feet before he could be trampled.