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Now! a voice yelled somewhere.
A golden torrent poured down on the hapless Merduks from holes in the ceiling of the gatehouse. It was
not liquid, but as soon as it struck the men below they screamed horribly, tearing at their armour and
dropping their swords. They flailed around in agony for long minutes whilst their comrades halted outside,
watching in helpless fury.
What is it? Corfe asked. It looks like
Sand, he was told by a grinning soldier. Heated sand. It gets inside the armour and fries them to a
cinder. More economical than lead, wouldn t you say?
Make way, there! A gunnery officer and a horde of blackened figures were man-hauling two
broad-muzzled falcons into position before the gate. As the torrent of sand faltered the Merduks outside
began clambering inside again with what seemed to Corfe to be arrant stupidity or maniac courage.
The falcons went off. Loaded with scrap metal, they did the remains of the gates little damage, but the
Merduks in the archway were blown to shreds. Blood and fragments of flesh, bone and viscera plastered
the interior of the archway.
They re falling back! someone yelled.
It was true. The attack on the gate was being abandoned for the moment. The Merduks were drawing
away.
Keep these pieces posted here, and get engineers to work on these gates, Corfe commanded the
gunnery officer, not caring what his rank might be. I ll send men down from the wall to reinforce you as
soon as I can.
Without waiting for a reply, he ran for the catwalk stairs to rejoin the men on the battlements.
Another assault the cover for the breaching party had just been thrown back. Men were reloading
the cannons frantically, charging their arquebuses, doctoring minor wounds. The dead were tossed off the
parapet like sacks; time for the solemnities later.
Andruw s sabre was bloody and his eyes startlingly white in a filthy face. What about the gate?
It s holding, for the moment. They re persistent bastards. I ll give them that. We sent half a hundred of
them to join their prophet before they drew back.
Andruw laughed heartily. By sweet Ramusio s blessed blood, they ll not walk over us without a stumble
or two. Was it as tight as this at Aekir, Corfe?
Corfe turned away, face flat and ugly.
It was different, he said.
M ARTELLUS watched the failure of the assault from his station on the heights of the citadel. His
officers were clustered about him, grave but somehow jubilant. The Merduk host was drawing back like
a snarling dog that has been struck on the muzzle. All over the eastern barbican on the far side of the river
a vast turmoil of rising smoke shifted and eddied, shot through with flame. Even here, over a mile away, it
was possible to hear the hoarse roar of a multitude in extremity, a formless, surf-like sound that served as
background to the rolling thunder of the guns.
He s lost thousands, one of the senior officers was saying. What is he thinking of, to throw troops
bare-handed against prepared fortifications like that?
A messenger arrived from the eastern bank, his face grimed and his chest heaving. Martellus read the
dispatch with thin lips, then dismissed him.
The gate is damaged. We would have lost it, were it not for the efforts of my new aide. Andruw puts his
own casualties at less than three hundred.
Some of the other officers grinned and stamped. Others looked merely thoughtful. They eyed the retreat
of the attacking Merduk regiments orderly despite the barrage that the Torunnan guns were laying
down then their gazes moved up the hillsides, to where the main host was encamped in its teeming
thousands and the Merduk batteries squatted silent and ominous.
He s playing with us, someone said. He could have continued that attack all day, and not blinked an
eye at the casualties.
Yes, Martellus said. The early light filled his eyes with tawny fire and made a glitter out of the white
lines in his hair. This was an armed reconnaissance, no more, as I said it would be. He now knows the
location of our guns and the dispositions of the eastern garrison. Tomorrow he will attack again, but this
time it will not be a sudden rush, unsupported and ill-disciplined. Tomorrow we will see Shahr Baraz
assault in earnest.
H UNDREDS of miles away to the west. Follow the Terrin river northwards to where the gap between
the Cimbric Mountains and the Thurians opens out. Pass over the glittering Sea of Tor with its dark fleets
of fishing boats and its straggling coastal towns. There, in the foothills of the western Cimbrics, see the
majestic profile of Charibon, where the bells of the cathedral are tolling for Vespers and the evening air is
thickening into an early night in the shadow of the towering peaks.
In the apartments that had been made over to the new High Pontiff Himerius, the great man himself and
Betanza, Vicar-General of the Inceptine Order sat alone, the attending clerics dismissed. The muddy,
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