Descent of Angels (21 page)

The reality was, of course, somewhat different.

I
T WAS HIS
first taste of war, of mass conflict, of the life-or-death struggle between two opposing armies, and Zahariel was afraid. It was not so much that he feared death. Life on Caliban was hard. It bred fatalism into its sons. From childhood he had been taught that his life was a finite resource that could be snatched from him at any moment. By the age of eight, he had faced death directly at least a dozen times. In the Order, once he had completed his first year’s training as a supplicant, he had been expected to practise with real blades and live ammunition.

As part of that same training he had stalked many of the predators that lurked in the forests, including cave-bears, swordtooths, deathwings and raptors. Finally, to prove himself worthy, he had undergone the ultimate test of his prowess, hunting one of the feared Calibanite lions.

He had confronted the creature and he had slain it, earning his knighthood.

War, though, was different from all these triumphs.

When a man hunted an animal, whatever its status, the hunt took the form of an extended duel, a contest of strength, skill and cunning between man and beast. In the course of a hunt, Zahariel would grow to know his adversary intimately. In contrast, war was an impersonal affair.

As he charged towards the enemy fortress beside his fellow knights, Zahariel realised that he could be struck dead on the battlefield without ever knowing the identity of his killer.

He might die and never see his enemy’s face.

It was strange, he supposed, but somehow it
did
make a difference.

He had always assumed that he would die facing his killer, whether it was a great beast, some lesser animal, or even another knight. The prospect of a death in the midst of battle, brought down at range by some anonymous foe, seemed almost terrifying.

Unnerved, Zahariel briefly felt icy fingers clutching at his heart.

He did not allow it to get the better of him. He was a son of Caliban. He was a knight of the Order. He was a man, and men feel fear, but he refused to surrender to it. His training as a knight included mental exercises intended to help steel his mind in times of crisis. He turned to them now.

He reminded himself of the sayings of the
Verbatim
, the tome from which flowed all the Order’s teachings. He reminded himself of Master Ramiel. He thought of the old man’s unblinking gaze, the eyes that seemed to drill into his soul. He thought of how disappointed the old man would be if he heard that Zahariel had failed in his duty.

Sometimes, it occurred to Zahariel, it is the height of bravery in a man’s life, simply to be able to put one foot in front of the other and continue in one direction even when every fibre of his being is saying he should turn and the run the other way.

Even as Zahariel ran towards the breach in the fortress wall, he saw bright descending flares as flaming projectiles roared to earth to land among the mass of charging knights. He heard screams, the shrill cries of wounded and dying men rising above the tumult. He saw knights caught in the blast of incendiaries, their bodies wreathed in flame and arms flailing uselessly around them as they stumbled past his field of vision to their deaths.

According to the artificers, each suit was once capable of being sealed against its environment, but such days were now gone. A close enough strike from an incendiary and a knight was all but guaranteed a horrific death as the heat from the fire leaked through his armour.

Scores of knights were dying.

Dozens more screamed in pain as they were wounded. The assault was faltering.

ELEVEN

T
HE RUBBLE
-
AND
body-strewn slopes of the breach were thick with fire and fury. The curtain of smoke twitched with the passage of bullets, and Zahariel heard the awful sound of their impacts on the knights’ steel plates. The air was filled with buzzing and whining as projectiles whizzed past him.

Zahariel’s tutors had schooled him on the different sounds bullets made as they passed and how to tell how close they were, but in the roaring hell of fire, smoke and noise in the breach, he couldn’t recall any of those lessons.

He scrambled over heaps of twisted rubble, broken slabs of masonry brought down by the explosions that had blasted the walls and piles of loose spoil that had been used as infill. Here and there, he saw the mangled body of one of his enemies, knights in shattered armour who lay broken and dead.

A shot ricocheted from his shoulder guard, sending him lurching off balance, but he quickly recovered from the impact and pushed on. Nemiel was beside him, scrambling up the slope of the breach with frantic energy, desperate to be the first to the top. Geysers of dirt were punched upwards by bullets, and coiling spirals flitted through the air as hails of missiles sawed from above.

Zahariel could see nothing of their enemies beyond smudged silhouettes and flaring muzzle flashes. Scores of knights were dead, but many more were still alive, wading through the weight of fire, and climbing the steep slope of rock and debris to get to grips with the Knights of Lupus.

The fear of death in this hellish ruin was great, but so too was the fear that his first battle as a Knight of the Order might also be his last. He had endured so much and fought so hard to reach this point that he did not want this inglorious, smoke-filled valley of rubble to be the site of his first and final charge.

Zahariel pushed on, the climb awkward due to his sword, but he was loath to climb to the top of the slope and meet an enemy without a blade in his hand. The ground shifted under his feet and he scrambled for purchase as he heard a hard
thunk
above him, as of timber on stone.

He looked up, seeing the shadow of something bouncing down through the smoke. Its sound was heavy and wooden, and he instantly knew what it was.

‘Get down!’ he yelled. ‘Everyone get down! A mine!’

‘No!’ cried another voice, a more persuasive one. ‘Keep going!’

Zahariel turned to see Sar Luther standing in the centre of the breach, bullets and flames whipping around him as though afraid to touch him. Sar Luther’s arm was extended, and Zahariel saw that he held his pistol aimed up into the smoke.

Luther’s pistol barked and the barrel of explosives vanished in a blinding white sheet of fire and noise high above them. The noise was incredible, and a cascade of shattered rocks tumbled down upon the knights of the Order.

Sar Luther looked down on Zahariel. ‘Up! Everyone get moving up! Now!’

Zahariel leapt to his feet as though the words were hardwired to his nervous system, and began climbing into the fire as though a pack of Calibanite lions were hot on his heels. The rest of his sword line and a dozen others followed suit, the power of Luther’s words driving them onwards.

He saw Nemiel up ahead, and pushed himself harder, not caring about the danger or the fear. The storm of shells from above intensified and he felt a number of stinging impacts on his armour, but none serious enough to stop him. Zahariel glanced behind him to see how many of the knights still climbed.

The red edges of the banner of the Order were frayed and scorched, its fabric ripped with tattered bullet holes, but the banner still flew, and the warriors around it climbed on in the face of almost certain death and pain thanks to its presence.

Zahariel took pride in watching the banner fly above the noble knights of the Order, and returned his attention to the climb ahead of him.

He pushed on, following Sar Luther as he forged upwards, passing every other warrior in the breach with unimaginable courage and speed. Luther’s steps seemed to flow over the rubble, his every footfall helped, his every step as sure as though he walked on a parade ground and not some terrifyingly dangerous breach.

The knights around Luther followed his shining example and followed him. Zahariel went after him into the smoke and felt the slope beneath his feet growing less steep as he climbed. Shapes resolved from the smoke, and he heard a blood-curdling war cry as the Knights of Lupus charged with their distinctive battle howl upon their lips.

Fearsome warriors clad in wolf pelts and bedecked with fangs, the Knights of Lupus may not have been numerous, but each one of them was a great warrior, a fighter trained in the ways of combat and the pursuit of knowledge.

Zahariel ducked a swinging axe blade and thrust with his sword, the blade punching through his attacker’s armour as if through wetted parchment. The man screamed foully and crumpled, blood jetting from his midriff. He wrenched the sword clear and drew the pistol he had been given by Brother Amadis.

All around him was chaos, knights of the Order and the Knights of Lupus caught up in a swirling melee of hacking, roaring chainblades and booming pistols. Zahariel shot and cut and hacked his way through the midst of the hardest fighting, pushing through the screaming throng to reach Sar Luther.

Nemiel bludgeoned his way through the fighting, using brute force and adrenaline to defeat his foes rather than finesse. Even as the knights of the Order began to overwhelm the defenders of the breach, Zahariel wondered how the other assaults were faring.

Had the Lion already carried the north wall?

Could the siege towers already have overwhelmed the defenders of the east wall, or might the troops with grappling hooks and ladders be over the west wall even now? With the Lion’s meticulous planning, anything was possible.

The battle might already be won. A sword crashed against his breastplate, the roaring teeth biting deep into the metal, before sliding clear and ripping upwards into the front of his helm. Zahariel jerked backwards, the teeth of the sword ripping out of the front of his helmet without taking his face with them.

Horrified at his lack of focus, Zahariel swung his sword desperately before him, buying precious seconds to pull his helm from his head and regain his bearings. A knight in grey plate armour, whose face was obscured by a silver helmet worked in the shape of a snarling wolf, danced back from his blows.

Zahariel shook his head clear of the shock of the blow as his opponent came at him again. The chain blade swung in a looping arc for his neck, but he stepped to meet the blow with his sword raised in a classic block. Even as he performed the move, he knew it was a mistake, his opponent luring him into the easy block just to wrong foot him. The enemy knight’s blade seemed to twist in mid-air, the blade arcing for his unprotected neck. Zahariel threw himself back, the blade passing within a finger breadth of opening his throat.

He crashed onto his rump as the knight stepped in for the kill. Zahariel rolled away from the killing blow, swinging his blade out in a low arc. The edge of his blade sliced clean through the knight’s legs at mid-shin level, and the man toppled like a felled tree.

Zahariel rose to his feet as the knight screamed in agony, the stumps of his legs pumping blood into the dust. Zahariel put a pair of bullets through the man’s helmet to spare him further agonies and took a second to reorient himself with the battle.

Knights streamed over the breach and pushed out onto the walls, slaughtering all in their path. While protected behind their ramparts, the fact that the Knights of Lupus were few had mattered little, but with the Order within the walls of the fortress, numbers meant everything.

Everything Zahariel had read of sieges had told him that they were almost always long, drawn out affairs, battles that moved at a slow pace until a tipping point was reached and the battle ended in one brief and bloody frenzy.

This, Zahariel recognised, was the tipping point of this battle. No matter the success or failure of the diversionary attacks, the Order’s forces had broken open the fortress and nothing could stop them from achieving victory.

The Knights of Lupus, however, had clearly not read the same military manuals and were determined to fight to the last and prolong their death agonies.

‘Zahariel!’ shouted a voice from below, and he looked through the smoke to see Sar Luther within the fortress’s courtyard, beckoning him onwards. ‘If you’re quite finished.’

Zahariel set off once more, crossing the threshold of the breach and making his way down the inner face of the breach in short jumps down the screed of rubble. Knights were massing, and with the wall head clear, it was time to sweep through the fortress and eliminate the last of the defenders.

‘Form into sword lines, we’re going to move through the inner gates towards the keep,’ ordered Luther. ‘It’s sure to get messy, so stay alert! This is the end for the Knights of Lupus, so they’re going to fight like cornered raptors. Keep watching the flanks for an ambush and keep pushing forward! Now let’s go!’

Zahariel found Nemiel in the crush of bodies of the Order’s knights and smiled to see his cousin alive and well.

‘You made it!’ he said.

‘First across the breach,’ cried Nemiel, ‘before even Sar Luther! I’ll get my own banner for this.’

‘Trust you to think of glory,’ said Zahariel, forming up with the survivors of Sar Hadariel’s sword line.

‘Well someone’s got to,’ shot back Nemiel. ‘Can’t all be about duty can it?’

Only three other knights had survived to make it this far, and Zahariel was thankful that Attias and Eliath had not yet been elevated to knighthood and had been spared the horror of the breach. Sar Hadariel nodded as though in approval when Zahariel and Nemiel formed up with him.

‘Good work in staying alive, brothers,’ said the hoary veteran. ‘Now let’s get this finished.’

The great banner that had climbed the breach finally reached them, its fabric even more damaged in the fighting, yet strangely undiminished, as though the scars earned in its passage across the walls imparted some even greater gravitas to it. Zahariel had never fought beneath a banner, but the idea of fighting with the noble banner of the Order flying overhead gave him a sense of fierce pride that he had not felt before.

The banner wasn’t just a flag or identifying marker, it was a symbol of everything the Order stood for: courage, honour, nobility and justice. To bear such a symbol was a great honour, but to fight beneath it was something special, something Zahariel understood was of supreme significance.