Daniel Polansky - Tomorrow, the Killing

Battles are often conceived of as duels between generals, a chess game played out in real time, and we pawns no more than the instrument of their designs. ‘The Twentieth took the hill,’ read the histories, a minor escapade barely warranting its single sentence. But let me tell you, if you were a member of the Twentieth you’d feel a hell of a lot different about the whole thing. ‘What hill?’ you might well find yourself asking, ‘and where the hell am I taking it?’

In the front ranks of a vast agglomeration of men, the dust from their footfalls kicking up around your eyes and the hum of their breathing drowning out any other sound, you’d be lucky to recognize the approaching incline. And that’s before you even hit the enemy, and your focus sharpens down to a pinprick. I’ve been in a lot of battles, and rarely in any of them did I have the faintest idea of what was going on. It’s enough to know there’s a man watching your back, and to spend any leftover energy watching theirs.

As the distance narrowed between us I caught sight of my opposite, the man whose job it was to oppose my passage, to wound and kill me if he was able. Sitting in camp you spent half the day talking about them, passing out bits of folklore disguised as wisdom. In time it became difficult to think of the enemy as being composed of individual particles, as if we had declared war on one vast but singular organism. In the face of the man ahead of me I recognized my error. Apart from the dye of his armor he was largely indistinguishable from any of the men I was marching beside, or indeed from myself.

It was a curious discovery, and not one I had time to contemplate. The weight of expectation, which is not to say duty, kept us moving forward. Fifty-odd paces out, at one with the rest of the rank, I brought my spear level.

The pike is an odd weapon. Useless as tits on a bull one-on-one, it presents an impermeable barrier if you can get it in the hands of a few hundred men sharp enough to point it in the same direction and stupid enough not to throw it away and go home. But that’s pretty much all it’s good for – it doesn’t lend itself to intricate movements or much in the way of technique, you don’t really wield it so much as hold it in place. I think we all had it in our heads that, at the final moment, the Dren were going to sprint forward onto the points of our weapons. They seemed to be operating under the same delusion, because a few feet outside of effective range both lines stuttered to a stop, and for one ludicrous moment I found myself wondering if maybe we’d all give up and go home.

Then the men behind us plowed forward, unable to see anything and thus immune to the sudden twinge of fear or humanity that had briefly halted our movement. I managed to keep myself standing but the end of my pike skipped upward harmlessly. Luckily the Dren marching counter to me was similarly inept, and his did the same. My neighbor to the left was not so fortunate, the head of a spear plunging through his leather carapace, the forward press of the men slowly skewering it through his chest and out his back.

The other thing about the pike is that it’s about twenty feet long and only a few inches of it can actually hurt a motherfucker. If you miss with the point there’s still a long way to go, staring at your opposite, both of you scared shitless. But it only lasts a few seconds before the inexorable momentum pushes you together, the mad scrum of flesh allowing for little in the way of maneuver.

Everyone around me was holding on to their spears like they were some sort of charm against death, but I figured fuck that and dropped mine, going for the long dirk in my belt. It was an awkward movement, my forehead pushing up against the Dren in front of me, but I managed it, reversing my hold and slipping the weapon into his gut, just above the groin, beneath the protection afforded by his armor.

Unlike most of my comrades, I’d killed before I’d entered the service, knew what it felt like to watch a man stare up at you blankly as whatever force animates him slips out of the hole you’ve made. But I’d always felt something of it afterward, could tell you every man I’d sent to meet She Who Waits Behind All Things, could tell you why I’d thought I had to send them to meet her. Not justify it – I won’t pretend that – but explain it at least, beyond that he was wearing a different colored outfit than I was.

Of course in the thick of things the moment barely registered. The dagger rose a second time, falling into my counterpart as of its own volition. I watched him die with my head tucked against his, close as lovers. After the third blow he slid limply to the ground, and I wish I could say I felt something about it but the truth is at that point my blood was up so high all I saw was the next man in line, and I stepped over the corpse, on it really, and launched myself into the Dren behind him.

He was quick, and he caught the edge of my blade with the shaft of his spear, the weight of the men behind us locking our weapons together. I jerked the ridge of my brow against his nose, snapping the fragile bone and smearing blood against my skull, but he didn’t drop, red leaking down over a rigid sneer. It was my introduction to what would rapidly become, along with the stupidity and gutlessness of the brass, the bane of my existence for the next five years – the legendary Dren grit, a willingness to endure pain and discomfort that seemed almost an inability to feel either, which ensured that every redoubt would be held to the last man, and to the last man’s last breath.

But still, meat ain’t stone, and I managed to hook his eye with my off hand, and he screamed and dropped his pike so as to keep himself from being blinded, and I wiggled my steel into the underside of his throat and moved on to the next one.

Whether because of the hole I’d made or some other factor I could feel their line bending. Not see it, I couldn’t see anything except what was directly in front of me and a few blurred motions from out the corners of my eyes – but sense it somehow, like a change in the wind. ‘We’ve got them!’ someone screamed, and I realized that it was me. ‘One more fucking push!’

I might have been right about that, or I might have been wrong, I never had the chance to find out. Because in the scant second after I had spoken, as the long, snaking line of Dren began to buckle and turn, as victory seemed just at the limit of our grasp, the world ended.

So it seemed, at least. Practically speaking, the results of a well-formed battle hex are indistinguishable from a black-powder barrage. They both result in the destruction of wide sums of flesh, the scattering of bone and brain – but one peculiarity that accompanies the use of sorcery, or more accurately fails to accompany it, is sound of any kind. In contrast to the ear-shattering boom of cannon, a hex is utterly silent. From out of the corner of my eye I saw a light so bright it nearly blinded me. But there was no noise connected to it, nothing to alert one aurally to the holocaust that was taking place.

The vacuum was quickly filled with the shrieks of my dying countrymen, those lucky or unlucky enough to have found themselves on the outskirts of the explosion. Having avoided outright death they now found their limbs atomized away to nothing. Their cries were picked up a second later by the surrounding infantry, to whom the spell had done no direct damage but who were quick to realize that our ranks had been irreparably shattered, and our flanks were bare of support.

Prepared for this sudden attack, the Dren redoubled their efforts, straightening their formation against ours. The sudden disappearance of a substantial portion of our unit had opened up a little room in my peripherals, but I didn’t have time to take notice, not with an approaching infantryman keen to square accounts for his two comrades. The end of my knife had broken off against the spine of the last Dren, and I discarded the remainder and dove shoulder first at his back-up, hoping to get within grappling range before he planted something sharp in my chest.