Roland Green - Great King_s war

At last the Holy Warriors retreated back down the slope out of range and dismounted. Someone with a lot of plumes and gilded armor was yelling and waving his arms at them, probably telling them to dismount. Most were beginning to follow his orders, when at almost point-blank range, a round shot took out a dozen or more men just to his right. To give him credit, the near hit didn't appear to faze the commander and he continued with his rant. Another half dozen cannons fired almost in a volley and shifted the entire front line of the Holy Warriors, scything down horses and men with equal impartiality.

The commander got back on his horse and the dismounted Holy Warriors advanced on foot over their own casualties and up the slope at a dead run. Harmakros' musketeers shot them down by the dozens, but that wasn't enough; hundreds of them reached the barricade and suddenly it was every man for himself. Verkan's riflemen continued to help thin their ranks, but more kept coming from behind. To make a difference here, Verkan's riflemen would have needed breech-loaders or Gatling guns!

The Mobile Force pikemen at the barricade dropped their pikes in favor of swords, mallets and pistols, while the musketeers swung their muskets like clubs. Over a third of his dragoons and reinforcements were dead or wounded before Harmakros began a slow retreat to the top of the ridge. Of the three thousand Holy Warriors, at least half their number littered the ground or had run away. Still, a formidable number kept charging.

Verkan fired five shots and hit four men before the first wave of dismounted Holy Warriors reached his boulder. He fired a sixth shot with his hide-away pistol, then used his rifle like a club, letting his unarmed-combat training take over his muscles and reflexes. He might look a little strange if anyone was watching carefully, but he'd not lay any bets on that and he did intend to stay alive.

The rifle wasn't quite balanced like the quarterstaff Verkan knew well, but the butt end's extra weight made up for it. Designed especially for Verkan, his rifle-while looking like a perfectly ordinary flintlock-was almost indestructible. With ridiculous ease he brained the first man who ran at him, poked a second in the groin, smashed a short sword or long knife out of the hand of the third and knocked down a fourth with a butt-blow to his armored chest and finished him with another to the forehead under the rim of his morion helmet.

He turned to see Xykos decapitate a heavily bearded Holy Warrior with his two-handed sword. The Veterans' banner-bearer had lost one arm to an evil-looking polearm and was in the process of losing the other, when Verkan shot his attacker dead with his belt pistol.

Someone was shouting in his ear and tugging at his arm. It was Dalon Saln, pulling him back from the edge of the slope. Xykos and one of the halberdiers were coming with him, but the third Veteran was dead and the banner-bearer was dying, one arm gone, the other crippled, but his teeth locked on the banner pole.

They cleared the Great Battery's field of fire just in time, as case shot from something heavier than a sixteen-pounder sprayed the slope. Two score of dismounted Holy Warriors and a few mounted ones behind them went down, and twice as many turned and ran; apparently even religious zeal had its limits.

Verkan and his bodyguards ran back another fifty yards, then stopped to make sure the rest of the Mounted Rifles were clear. They were. The number of Holy Warriors, both mounted and on foot, climbing the slope discouraged him from lingering to count the Rifles' casualties, particularly since the Holy Warriors were now being pushed ahead of the first ranks of the Royal Square. A company of billmen rose out of a draw, and a round shot smashed the first six of them into a bloody, screaming tangle.

Verkan began to reload his rifle on the move, and discovered the lock was hopelessly jammed with blood and gore. He made a mental note to suggest caltrops to Kalvan if he could find a non-contaminating way of doing so. Strewn over the slopes of the ridge, those multipointed hoof destroyers would have made Kalvan's Great Battery a lot more cavalry-proof.

The ground between Verkan and the Great Battery offered little cover or concealment, and he had the nasty feeling that the career of the Mounted Rifles was about to end here. A four-pounder had already been overrun, and an old-style eight-pounder was being defended by its crew against mounted Holy Warriors. What was left of Harmakros' three regiments of dragoons was manhandling two eight-pounders and the sixteen-pounder called Galzar's Teeth into a position where they could hit the Styphoni at point-blank range.

Alkides himself was standing on the breech of Galzar's Teeth in a fraction of his shirt and a smaller fraction of his trousers, defaming the ancestry and habits of his gunners for not moving faster. Behind the big gun rode Harmakros, and behind him was a line of men carrying objects the size and shape of round shot, but not quite…

Verkan suddenly realized he was about to see the first test of explosive shells in Kalvan's Time-Line. While he appreciated the honor, he hoped the fusing was reasonably accurate or the shells might burst right over the Mounted Rifles.

"Down!" he shouted, gesturing frantically. The Riflemen obeyed, searching for any fold in the ground large enough to give at least the illusion of safety. The two eight-pounders bellowed together, hammering the advancing Holy Warriors with grape shot. The line stopped and a good number of them dropped to the ground as well. The Riflemen opened fire, to encourage this notion.

With his rifle useless and the action just out of pistol range, Verkan was free to watch the entire process of loading the first shell, including the lighting of the fuse, the various rites of propitiation and Alkides firing Galzar's Teeth. Verkan kept his head up, following the shell all the way to where it struck the ground, bounced twice, rolled under the legs of a Holy Warrior's horse-and exploded!

It took only four shells to convince the Holy Warriors that they were facing something unusual. From "unusual" to "Demonic" was a short mental step for most of them. Contemplating the undignified speed of the Holy Warrior's retreat, Verkan had to admit that superstition could have its uses.

Verkan would have felt better if Galzar's Teeth hadn't fired a fifth shell, which burst over the Mounted Riflemen. When the smoke cleared away, he saw that the one-eyed captain would never argue with him again, and the captain wasn't the only casualty.

Then the massed billmen of the Royal Square topped the rise, still in their columns of march and with a self-confident swagger that said bluntly, "Clear the way, you amateurs. The professional soldiers have arrived."

"Move out!" Verkan ordered. There weren't enough guns the size of Galzar's Teeth to take a bite out of these men. He turned to Xykos and added, "When we reach Captain-General Alkides, you make sure he goes with us. I don't give a damn what he says, general or no general!"

The grin splitting Xykos' face told Verkan that Alkides would have an easier time avoiding the marksmen of the Royal Square than he would escaping his giant bodyguard.

Sirna stepped out the door of the foundry warehouse, mopped the sweat off her forehead, and looked up at the roof where Captain Ranthar was still wearing a groove in the wood as he paced back and forth, looking off to the southwest. Sirna had been up there herself earlier in the day, but the steady drumming of gunfire and the vast cloud of gray smoke off toward Phyrax didn't tell her anything.

She doubted they told Ranthar very much either, and suspected that he was up on the roof because it was a way of not having to talk with the rest of the University Team. She was sure he'd sensed the hostility of some of them, and she also suspected that he felt guilty at not being in battle with his comrades-and whom did he see as his comrades, his Chief Verkan Vall or the Mounted Rifles?