Django Wexler - The Thousand Names

It worked. She sat back, letting out a long breath, her shoulders shaking from released tension. Whatever Feor did, it worked. A little patch of oddly-colored skin was a small price to pay. Winter looked from one girl to the other, still half in shock. It really worked.

She was suddenly unutterably tired. Leaving the dirty bandages on the floor, she fetched one of her own shirts and pulled it onto Bobby’s limp form, struggling with the sleeves and the buttons. Fortunately, the girl’s bust was modest even by Winter’s standards. The shirt alone would probably be cover enough for the casual eye. Graff knows, but that doesn’t mean everyone has to.

Winter covered Bobby with a blanket, checked Feor one more time, and then flopped onto her own bedroll. She was asleep in an instant and didn’t dream at all, not even of Jane.

MARCUS

At dawn, the Auxiliaries began a cautious advance, a company in loose order probing the rubble and barricades to their front.

Marcus, determined to buy every minute he could, had sent Adrecht and his Fourth Battalion to man the line while the rest of the Colonials pulled back around the hilltop temple. These soldiers almost immediately began a harassing fire, driving back the initial tentative push. The Auxiliaries formed up, solid blocks of brown and tan parade-ground even, and charged into the tangle of detritus with a yell.

The men of the Fourth did not stand to receive them. They were too few, and in any case their orders were to fall back. Each man fired and then ran for it, finding another covered position farther up the hill to reload. Shots rang out from the spreading Khandarai line, trying to find their attackers, but the men in blue were as elusive as mosquitoes. Marcus watched with satisfaction from his hilltop vantage as the Auxiliary advance fell apart, neat lines breaking down in their zeal to come to grips with a retreating enemy amidst the wreckage.

It would have been an ideal time for a counterattack, as he’d done so many times yesterday, but circumstances had changed. There were two more Khandarai battalions waiting, well formed and ready, down by the bank of the canal. Worse, there were guns-all four of the Gesthemels and two of the monster naval guns, no doubt loaded with canister in anticipation of just such a move. So the Colonials held their ground, Adrecht’s men continuing to deliver harassing fire while the flustered Auxiliary officers reorganized their scattered ranks to continue the advance.

That bought a couple of hours, all told, and left the approach to the hill scattered with brown-and-tan-uniformed bodies. But the ultimate outcome was not in doubt. The Fourth was gradually pushed back through the town and toward the hilltop, until the advancing Auxiliaries finally ran into something solid. The Colonials had constructed a line of barricades, bricks and timber from destroyed houses, with the bulk of the stone-walled temple looming behind them. As soon as the enemy approached, this position exploded into fire, and the startled Auxiliaries reeled back out of range.

A few minutes later, Marcus watched the other two Khandarai battalions start moving up. As Adrecht had predicted, they were veering left and right, respectively, pushing past the now-empty streets of the destroyed village and out onto the plain, where they could get on the flanks and rear of the force on the hill. They would converge, like the pincers of a scorpion, and from the time they came into range of the fortifications the Colonials would be committed. No way out, except for surrender. And everyone knew what the Redeemers did to prisoners.

• • •

The two big naval guns each had a cloud of attendants who clustered and fussed around them like priests around an altar. In spite of all the attention, the first shot went wide, whistling past the temple and continuing for quite a long way out across the squelching-wet fields. The next, however, scored a solid hit, and before long both guns were pummeling away. The huge things were a bear to reload, so the shots came at intervals of three or four minutes.

Marcus had never been inside a stone building under bombardment. It wasn’t something that had been on the syllabus at the War College because it wasn’t supposed to happen, now that big stone castles had gone the way of the crossbow and the trebuchet. A good siege gun would produce an impression on even the strongest stone, no matter how thick or high the walls, so breaking them down was only a matter of time. A proper fortification looked more like a burrow thrown up by enormous and geometrically minded moles, with overlapping fields of fire for the defender and sloping berms of dirt to deflect cannonballs or absorb their impact in a harmless spray of soil.

He was unprepared, therefore, for the way that the cannonballs rang against the walls, as though the temple were being attacked by a swarm of angry bells. The distant thud of the gun itself arrived only just in advance of the shot, and every hit shook the walls like the entire building was rocking in a gale. Dust sifted down from the ceiling as ancient stones were jostled, and there were periodic alarming cracks and pops. One of the men brought Marcus a cannonball, still warm from its firing, which had ricocheted high and landed amongst the defenders. It was about the size of a child’s head, and flattened on one side by the terrific impact at the end of its flight. The iron rippled around that spot, as though it had been briefly liquid.

Marcus called for Archer, who had managed to clean up considerably overnight. A silver Church double circle was prominent on the breast of his uniform.

“How long have we got?” Marcus demanded.

“Well, sir,” the lieutenant said, “I’m an artilleryman, not a siege engineer, but-”

“Do your best.”

“Yessir. I took a look and there’s already a few cracked blocks. On the upside, those guns aren’t very accurate, so they’re battering away all over the wall. On the downside, this place wasn’t designed as a fortress, and as best I can tell there’s no bracing or internal supports.”

Marcus put two fingers to his head and massaged his temples. “And so?”

“Once part of the wall goes, the whole thing is going to come down in a hurry. A couple of hours, I’d say. It could be longer, of course, if we get lucky, but I wouldn’t count on it.”

A couple of hours. It couldn’t be past eight in the morning. He’d tentatively hoped to hang on until nightfall, but. .

There was a tremendous boom from outside, echoing off the temple walls and shaking more dust from the ceiling. Marcus looked at Archer in a panic. To his surprise, the lieutenant was smiling.

“What the hell was that?”

“Ah. I’d been expecting that, sir. I’ll have to go and check, of course, but in my professional opinion one of the thirty-six-pounders has just exploded. Those are old tubes, sir, and they’ve been working them pretty hard. I’m amazed it took this long.”

• • •

“I’ll give them this,” Adrecht said. “They’re game little bastards.”

He and Marcus stood at a second-floor window, its glass long ago kicked out. The view wasn’t as good as it would have been from the front steps, but there was less risk of catching a cannonball.

One team of Khandarai was already dragging the wreckage of the ruined naval gun out of the way, along with the bodies of the gunners who’d been caught by the shrapnel when the overheated tube burst. Across the river, a second team was pushing another of the big guns into the ford, two dozen men hauling on ropes or shoving from behind while four more walked gingerly in front of it, feeling for soft patches of mud that might bog the heavy thing down.