David Drake - Conqueror

The stiff breeze swung it back and forth, then streamed it out sideways. Raj ducked down and pulled Suzette with him as bullets pocked the limestone ashlars around the window.

"I don't think the Whitehalls are all that popular around here," he said.

"Provincials," Suzette replied, rounding out her vowels with a crisp East Residence tone. "What can one expect?"

"I'm a monkey from the wilds myself," Raj answered her grin, pushing away the knowledge of what the heavy bone-smasher bullets from the enemy rifle-muskets could do to a human body. Hers, for example.

Instead he duckwalked below the line of the windows to one in the corner and looked out. The amorphous mob of the Brigade vanguard was turning into something like a formation. Welf's banner was down among them now, and he and his sworn men — probably a cross between a warband and a real staff — were pushing the remnants and individual survivors of the storming party and the 5th's greeting into line and behind what cover there was, even if only the heaped bodies scattered in clumps across the broad C-shaped arc of the cleared zone they held. As soon as that was done they started forward. . right towards his HQ.

Perils of a reputation, he thought dryly. Teodore had a personal mad on with him; also he was probably apprehensive about leaving Raj in his rear.

"Runner," he said sharply. "Compliments to Captain Heronimo, and shift all splatguns to the front immediately." Suzette handed him a glass and sank down beside him, back to the wall; he drank the water thirstily.

"Young Teodore is a clever lad," he said absently. The fire directed at the houses was thickening up, growing more regular. "But he's making a mistake. He should leave a blocking force and peel back more of the wall, go for the gates."

Suzette touched him lightly on the knee. "Can we stop them?"

"Not for long," he said. "Not for very long at all."

* * *

"Your Mightiness," the courier said, as he spat the reins out of his teeth.

One hand held a pistol, the other a folded dispatch. His dog stood with trembling legs, head down and washcloth-sized tongue lolling as it panted.

"Report," Ingreid Manfrond said. Howyrd Carstens took the paper.

"Lord of Men," the dispatch rider said, "High Brigadier Asmoto reports we couldn't break their square — it's advancing, slowly. More infantry coming up from the river, marching in square, about as many again but strung out in half a dozen clumps. The High Brigadier requests more troops."

"No!" Manfrond roared. "Tell him to stop them. They're only foot soldiers, by the Spirit. Go!"

The man blinked at him out of a dirt-splashed face and hauled his dog's head around, thumping his spurred heels into its ribs. The beast gave a long whine and shambled into a trot.

Another rider galloped up and reined in, his mount sinking down on its haunches to break. "Lord of Men," he said. "From Hereditary Colonel Fleker, at the eastern gate. Sally."

"How many?" Manfrond barked.

"Still coming out, Your Mightiness. Thousands, mounted troops only — and guns, lots of guns. They punched right through us."

The Brigade's ruler sank back in the saddle, grunting as if belly-punched. Beside him Howyrd Carstens unlimbered his telescope and peered to the southeast. They were on a rise a kilometer north of the point where the assault had carried the defenses; the action over to the west was mostly hidden except for the rising palls of powder-smoke, but they could see the northeast corner of the city walls.

"I told you the wall was too fucking easy," he rasped. "Here they come, guns and all."

Ingreid snatched the instrument, twisting the focus with an intensity that dimpled the thin brass under his thick-fingered grip. The first thing he saw was Brigade troops scattering, a thin screen of mounted dragoons. Some of them were firing backward with their revolvers. Then the head of a column of enemy troops came into view, loping along in perfect alignment at a slow gallop. A half-regiment or so came into view — a battalion, they called it — and then a battery of four guns, then more troops. .

"Get the message off to Teodore to withdraw now," Carstens said. "I'll get the flank organized."

"Withdraw?" The telescope crumpled in his hands, and the weathered red of his face went purple. "Withdraw, when we've won? "

"Won what? " Carstens roared. "We've got our forces split three ways, thousands of them on the other side of the bloody wall, no gate, and eight thousand of the enemy coming out to corn-cob us while we look the other way!"

"Shut up or I'll have you cut down where you stand!" Ingreid roared. "Get down there and hold them off while Welf finishes Whitehall."

Carstens stared at him incredulously, then looked down the hill. The bulk of the Brigade force — sixty or seventy thousand men — was jammed up against the face of the Old Residence northern wall, what he could see of it through the smoke. Most of the men were firing at the walls and the towers, the ones who weren't dying in the moat. Artillery ripped at them, and thousands of rifles. A section of the wall a thousand meters long was quiet, in Brigade hands. . except that the towers were still mostly holding out. The north gate was a colossal scrimmage, the moat full of bodies. He looked over at the enemy force. Already cutting in west, their lead element was north of the main Brigade force under the walls. Carstens could play through what happened next without even trying; the guns — must be fifty of them — pulling into line and the Civvie cavalry curving in like a scythe.

"Get Teodore out of there, you fool," he said. "I'll try and slow down the retreat."

* * *

"UPYARZ!"

Raj rose and shot the Brigadero in the face. He toppled backward off the ladder, but the one below him raised his musket one-handed through the window, poking up from below the frame. Raj felt time freeze as he struggled to turn the weapon in his left hand around. He could see the barbarian's finger tightening on the trigger, when something burned along the ribs on his right side. Suzette's carbine, firing from so close behind him that the powder scorched his jacket.

The Brigadero screamed; his convulsive recoil sent the bullet wild, whtaanngg off the hard stone of the wall. Suzette stepped forward, her face calm and set. She leaned out and fired six times, pumping the lever of the repeating carbine with smooth economy. Behind her the Master Sergeant was pulling the friction-fuse tab on a handbomb; he shouldered her aside without ceremony as the last shot blasted the helmet off a dragoon climbing up toward the Whitehall banner. The bomb arched down and exploded at the base of the ladder. Men screamed, but the heavy timbers remained, braced well out from the wall. Raj and the noncom set the points of their sabers against the uprights and heaved with a shout of effort. Steel sank into wood, and the ladder tilted sideways with a gathering rush.

"Stairs!" someone shouted.

Raj left Suzette thumbing rounds into the tube magazine of her Colonial weapon and led a rush to the head of the stairs. There were three rounds left in his revolver; Center's aiming-grid slid down over his vision, and he killed the first three men to burst up the stairwell. The fourth stumbled over their bodies because he refused to release the rifle-musket in his hands. Raj kicked him in the face with a full-force swing of his leg. Bones crumpled under the toe of his riding boot, feeling and sounding like kicking in thin slats in a wooden box. The man after that swung a basket-hilted sword at Raj's knees. Raj hopped over it, stamped on the barbarian's wrist as he landed, and thrust down between neck and collarbone. Muscle clamped on the blade, almost dragging it from his hand; then half a dozen troopers were shooting down the stairway on either side of him, or thrusting with their long bayonets.