Брайан Макклеллан - The Siege of Tilpur

Three men emerged from the nearest guardhouse. Tamas threw himself forward, knife drawn, making short, bloody work of the soldiers before dashing inside. He drew his pistol as he mounted the stairs, listening to the shouts of the Gurlish as soldiers swarmed the courtyard. He reached out with his senses, detonating all the powder he could reach.

It wasn’t enough. By the time he gained the top of the wall, the courtyard below was swarming with figures, muskets raised, shooting blindly up at the parapets. Tamas risked a glance out of the guardhouse and his heart fell.

He’d gotten turned around down in the courtyard and gone up the wrong staircase. The ropes were on the opposite side of the fort. His squad was gone, whether captured or already over the edge he did not know, but he was alone in a hornet’s nest of Gurlish soldiers with no way to get off the walls. A thirty-five foot fall would at least break his legs, even with the powder trance.

He’d have to make a run for the ropes.

Only a sixth sense, a tingling at the base of his spine, made him throw himself backward into the guardhouse as fire swept across the parapet, nearly blinding him with its brilliance. His mouth turned went dry.

The Gurlish Privileged sorcerer had joined the hunt.

How many Privileged did the garrison have? One? Two? He couldn’t remember. He did know he wouldn’t last thirty seconds against a Privileged. Show his face, and he would be incinerated instantly. Stay here and he would be incinerated when they found him. A pair of broken legs was beginning to look like a good option.

He reached out with his powder-enhanced senses, searching for the Privileged. He could sense one nearby, down in the courtyard and a second one not much farther . . . reaching the top of the wall where Farthing’s ropes marked their escape.

The Privileged was going after Tamas’s fleeing quad. He would kill all four of them down on the desert floor with only the snap of his fingers. They’d be dead before they had a chance to scream.

Tamas lifted his pistol, praying to Kresimir that the first Privileged, down in the courtyard, was not looking his direction.

He leaned out of the gatehouse and found the second Privileged, pinpointing him in the gloom by his aura of sorcery and the white gloves raised above his head. It wasn’t a long shot, perhaps fifty yards at most, but it would be near impossible with a pistol in these conditions.

For anyone but a powder mage.

Tamas let his breath out slowly, forcing his hand steady as he pulled the trigger. He willed the bullet forward, drawing power from a powder charge in his other hand, nudging the bullet’s trajectory with his mind as he adjusted for rain and wind. It flew for what felt like an eternity – yet couldn’t have been more than a fraction of a second – and blew the side of the Privileged’s head clean off.

Tamas discarded the pistol and leaped back into the guardhouse as flames slammed into the wall just to his left. He waited, heart pounding, and thought about the drop.

He could hear the sound of boots on the stairs below him, and the whispering of orders. He reached out, touching off powder, and flinched away from the explosion. Sooner or later they’d figure out who he was – what he was – and the Privileged would fill the tower with flame from top to bottom.

He felt the bit of leather in his pocket, remembering Farthing’s words; bite this between your teeth. If you fall, bite harder and hope the ground is soft. He put it between his teeth.

That’s when he remembered something he’d seen in the courtyard, not more than a dozen feet from where he could sense the Privileged – the dark, stone pit of the fort well. He pictured Lillen’s drawing in his head, considering the fifty foot drop into the cold water below. It might just be more survivable than the drop from the walls and they wouldn’t be likely to chase him.

Tamas reached out with his senses, getting a good feel for where the Privileged was in relation to himself – twelve feet along the wall, eight feet from it, and about thirty feet down.

“I hope,” Tamas said to himself as he climbed to his feet, “that he’s a fat son of a bitch.”

Tamas raced out of the guardhouse, a dozen paces down the parapet, and then leaped into the courtyard, pushing off with every bit of power the powder would give him. His arms cartwheeled as he soared through the air, his bowels turning to jelly as he fell, the dark ground, crawling with Gurlish infantry, coming up to meet him.

The last thing he saw before impact was white gloves reaching upward. Then he slammed into a body, the Privileged crumpling beneath him with a scream. Tamas rolled out of the fall and managed to come up on his feet, stumbling on a turned ankle. The bullet from a hastily fired musket tore through his shoulder. He grit his teeth against the pain and detonated all the powder within reach. The blast deafened him, and he hoped it sowed enough confusion as he limped toward the well.

Another bullet ripped through the arm of his jacket, and the whistle of another buzzed past his ear. Smoke from the detonated powder hung in the damp air, filling his nostrils, urging him on. He reached the lip of the well and threw himself over the edge, knowing that the fall itself would likely kill him.

It didn’t matter, he just had to get away.

He crashed into something solid – a moment of confusion overwhelmed him before he realized why he wasn’t falling. An iron grate covered the well, preventing his descent. He gasped, staring up into the rain, and felt his heart sink. Here he was, in the middle of the Gurlish fort, and now cornered like a rat in a cage.

He was going to die the same way he lived: arrogant, desper­ate, and still a goddamned sergeant.

A Gurlish infantryman loomed over him. Hands grabbed him by the ankle and arms, trying to pull him up. Tamas reached for Farthing’s knife, only to find it gone from its sheath. Helplessly, he watched as the infantryman raised the butt of his rifle and brought it down on his head. Tamas raised one hand to ward off the blow, feeling the sharp pain as his wrist broke.

Something shifted beneath him. There was a grating of metal on metal as the grate collapsed. Tamas gasped, and then suddenly he was falling. The blackness of the well swallowing him, the vision of the Gurlish infantrymen zooming away. His legs hit the side of the well, sending him tumbling head over heels until he hit water far below.

The breath was knocked out of him and he sank, stunned, into the dark. He felt his limbs scrape along mossy stone, the pain of his wounds overwhelming him to the point of numbness. He tried to scrabble for purchase and air, but found neither.

He felt his limbs weakening, barely able to keep himself from gasping in a lungful of water.

There was a sudden rumble through the water, and then a glow from somewhere ahead lent him one last burst of strength. He pushed himself forward and suddenly his head broke the water as he was swept along in the current of the river below Tilpur.

Above him, flames licked the sky over the fort. He stared up, incredulous, able to think of nothing but the air in his lungs, before he realized that the munitions had gone up.

With a laugh that came out as a choked sob, Tamas struggled toward the shore.

Tamas walked through the main gate of Tilpur fortress three days after his nighttime raid. His arm hung at his side uselessly in a sling, wrist set and bandaged with his uniform jacket hanging off his shoulder. everything hurt – his head, his wrist, his ribs, his shoulder, his legs. A light powder trance held the pain at a low buzz in the back of his head. He felt naked without his musket hanging off his shoulder or a shako on his head, and seeing the courtyard in the daylight sent a shiver down his spine. He half expected a Gurlish soldier to lean out the window of the barracks and take a shot at him.