Paul Kearney - Ships from the West

The survivors of the charge, many now on foot, streamed back across the plain through the trampled debris of their tented camp, and sought sanctuary about the walls of their citadel. The Torunnan advance continued.

Aruan, aghast, watched the ruin of his Knights from the high tower of the Pontifical Palace. Inceptine clerks and errand-runners clustered about him like black flies settling on a wound, but none dared meet their master's blazing eyes.- As his gaze went hither and thither across the wide battlefield, he saw the Almarkan troops south of Charibon stand to fire a volley of ragged arquebus fire. The oncoming Torunnans were not even checked, but closed up their ranks and marched over the bodies of their dead. Even as he watched, the pikes of the Orphans came down from the vertical and became a bristling fence of bitter points which reflected no light. The Almarkans could not withstand that fearsome sight, and began to fall back to the dubious shelter of their encampment, pausing to fire as they went. The Torunnan phalanx paused, and the thousand arquebusiers within its ranks fired in their turn. Then out of the smoke the Orphans marched on once more. They did not seem to be men, but rather minute cogs in some great, terrible engine of war, as unstoppable as a force of nature.

Aruan's eyes rolled back in his head and a great snarling came from his throat. His aides backed away, but he was utterly indifferent to them. He gathered his strength and launched a bolt of pure, focussed power into the east, like a puissant broadhead propelled by a bow of immense force. This lightning-swift Dweomer scrap carried the message of his mind's demand.

Bardolin, to me.

He came back to himself and snapped at his aides without looking at them, his eyes still fixed on the vast panorama of the smoking battlefield below.

'Loose the Hounds,' he said.

The Torunnan line opened out. As the main body of the infantry advanced, the Cathedrallers turned north and cov shy;ered their open flank, and with them came Rilke's guns. But in the gap left by the departure of the red horsemen, Colonel Olba's reserve formation shook out from column into line of battle, and faced west to guard against any fresh attack by the remnants of the Knights. Near the apex of these two lines the Torunnan King, his standard rippling sable and scarlet above him, took up position surrounded by his Bodyguard.

From the north-west the long columns of glittering mail-clad gallowglasses, the storm troops of the Second Empire, approached, while from their camps along the shores of the Torian Sea trotted fresh contingents of Almarkans and Peri shy;grainians and Finnmarkans. The blue sky was dotted with the tiny flapping shapes of homunculi running their master's errands. Aruan was recalling every tercio that remained be shy;tween the Cimbrics and the Narian Hills to the defence of Charibon. And still the bells tolled madly in the churches, and the Torunnans came on like a wave of black iron.

It was Golophin who sensed their coming first. He stiffened in the saddle of the army mule which was his preferred mount and seemed almost to sniff the air.

'Corfe,' he cried. 'The Hounds!'

The King looked at him, and nodded. He turned to Astan his bugler. 'Sound me the "halt".'

Clear and cold over the tumult of the battle the horn call rang out. As soon as the notes had died the buglers of other companies and formations took it up, and in seconds the entire battle-line had stopped moving, and the Orphans grounded their pikes. Those two miles and more of armed men and stamping horses paused as though waiting, and the field became almost quiet except for stray spatters of gunshots here and there and the neighing of impatient destriers. To the north the bells of Charibon had fallen silent.

Golophin seemed to be listening. He stood up tense and stiff in his stirrups while his mule shifted uneasily under him. Soon all the men of the army could hear it. The mad, caco shy;phonous chorus of a wolf pack in full cry, but magnified so that it rose up over the trampled and bloodstained and scorched grass of the battlefield and seemed to issue from the very air about their heads.

'Arquebusiers, stand by!' Corfe shouted, raising the Answerer, and down through the army the order was re shy;peated, while the Cathedrallers clicked open their saddle-holsters and reached for their matchlocks.

They came in a huge pack, hundreds, thousands of them. From the centre of Charibon they poured along the streets in a fanged, hairy torrent, their eyes glaring madly and their claws clicking and sliding on the cobbles. The human troops of Aruan made way for them in terror, shrinking against walls and ducking into doorways. But the Hounds ignored them. Running now on four legs, now on two, they burst out of the narrow streets and formed up vast as a cloud on the plain before Charibon, marshalled by mail-clad Inceptines. Lycan-thropes of every shape and variety imaginable milled there, yapping and snarling and hissing their hatred at the silent ranks of the Torunnans, a tableau from some primeval night shy;mare.

The Almarkans, who were caught between the two lines, streamed west in utter panic, collapsing the last of their tents behind them, some dropping their weapons as they ran. They were not professionals but shepherds of the Narian Hills, fishermen from the shores of the Hardic Sea, and they wanted no part of the slaughter to come.

Corfe stared narrowly at the mobs of shifters who snapped and spat by the thousand before his men, but yet obeyed the commands of their Inceptine leaders and remained in place. He shaded his eyes and looked up at the high buildings of Charibon itself, less than a mile away now, and wondered if perhaps one of the figures he saw standing there was the architect of these monstrosities. A small group of men was watching from the tower next to the cathedral – one of them must be Aruan, surely. And even as he watched the air seemed to shimmer about them, and ere he looked away, rubbing his watering eyes, he was sure their number had increased by one.

In that moment, the Hounds of God sprang forward. They loped through the ruined camp of the Almarkans looking from afar like a tide of rats, and the roaring, howling and snarling they made as they came on made the horses rear up and fight their bridles in fear. Corfe gave no order, for his men knew what to do. The Hounds ran straight up to his line in a boiling mass, and with them came an overpowering, awful stink, heavy as smoke.

With forty yards to go the Orphans levelled their pikes once more, and every firearm in the entire army was discharged in one long, stertorous volley that seemed to go on for ever. The front of the army was hidden in a solid wall of smoke and a moment later hundreds and hundreds of werewolves and shifters of all shapes and misshapes came hurtling out of it and threw themselves upon the Torunnan front rank.

The army seemed to shudder at the impact, and was at once engaged in hand-to-hand combat all along its length, and Corfe could see soldiers being flung through the air and smashed and clawed off their feet. But every time a shifter struck one of Corfe's men, no matter how glancing the blow, it shrieked and at once collapsed. Soon at the feet of the Orphans and the Torunnans of the front line a horrible tidemark built up, a barricade of nude bodies. For when the shifters were so much as grazed by the spiked iron of the Torunnan armour, the Dweomer left them, and their beast-bodies melted away.

As the smoke of the initial volley cleared and drifted in rent patches out to sea, it was possible to perceive the carnage that the arquebusiers had wrought. Thousands of naked corpses littered the plain, in places lying piled in mounds three and four deep. The grass was dark and slimy with their blood.

The attack of the Hounds faltered. Even through the blood rage that impelled them they finally realised their mistake, and began to pull back from that deadly line of iron-clad men. They streamed away in their hundreds, trampling their Inceptine officers or, snarling, beating them aside. But there Was to be no chance even in retreat. As soon as they broke off the army's arquebuses were levelled again, and Corfe heard the voices of his officers bellowing out. Another volley, and another. Every round his men fired was made not of lead, but of pure iron, and the heavy bullets snicked and whined and scythed across the battlefield so that the surviving Hounds were cut down in swathes as they withdrew. When the smoke finally cleared again the plain was empty of life, and the corpses of Aruan's most feared troops littered it like a ghastly windfall. They had been utterly destroyed. An eerie silence fell over the field, as though all men were astounded by the sight.