Gold Throne in Shadow (33 page)

Outside, mounting the walls, he took a deep breath. This would be the final push. He was physically whole and fresh, having been restored by his healing magic, but he had only one small spell left. Their last remaining secret was the six-inch Napoleons, as yet unused.

“Fire arrows!” came a sentry's cry, and a moment later a flight of burning shafts fell among the camp. Kennet had the water bottle in his hands, and he dashed around putting them out. But if one managed to land in an ammunition store, it would get ugly.

Looking over the wall, he saw the archers preparing another volley. They were three hundred feet out and obviously thought they were safe from counterattack. They should have been; at that range, with nothing more than starlight, the men could not possibly pick out targets. But the ulvenmen were holding flaming arrows to their chest.

“Shoot them,” he ordered, and rifles barked. The dancing lights in the distance began to fall to the ground and stop moving. Then they all fell, as the archers cast away their arrows and fled.

If that was the extent of the attack, the ulvenmen must be getting desperate.

Then he felt the ground tremble slightly under his feet and realized the ulvenmen had a surprise of their own planned.

Because they were so large, the
Triceratops
became visible much farther away. They trundled toward the fort, gradually picking up speed.

“Stop them!” he cried, and the small cannons began to fire.

“Faster,” he muttered, as his crewmen reloaded their guns. The dinosaurs were easy to hit, but one shot from a two-inch cannon only made them angry.

The six-inch guns were loaded with grape-shot, for short-range slaughter. Their crews started unloading the rounds, intending to replace them with solid cannonballs that could hit the big dinosaurs at long range. Christopher swore at their foolishness until they emptied the guns the easy way, by firing them into the darkness. The explosion was tremendous. If nothing else, it was good for morale.

Finally the big guns were properly loaded. They belched, spitting tongues of fire ten feet long. Christopher saw a huge dinosaur stumble and fall, and he started breathing again.

As the herd approached, Christopher could see small figures swarming around them. The entire ulvenman army, advancing on foot.

The small cannons fired another salvo, and another
Triceratops
trumpeted and fell, crushing ulvenmen as it rolled over. Christopher could see the dinosaurs were blindfolded, with huge swaths of cloth over their eyes. The
Triceratops
weren't just baggage trains; they were mobile siege engines. Ten-ton battering rams. And they would be here in heartbeats. Time for only one more salvo.

“Double powder, and don't fire until you are sure,” he shouted. Then he looked for something to hang on to.

At point-blank range, the cannons shot the beasts in the head. The huge bony plates shattered, and several
Triceratops
collapsed. But three sailed on, driving head first into the wall. He could feel the section of solid rock lift up slightly, vibrate, and then crack.

One of the dinosaurs fell over, stunned, one horn snapped in half. One blundered off in a different direction, blind and angry, trampling ulvenmen under its feet. The third went berserk, pounding the wall like a jackhammer. Dust sprayed in the air as the stone began to disintegrate.

Ladders were slapped up, and again a horde of ulvenmen scampered over the top. This time they would not be dispensed with by the time the carbines had to reload.

Christopher opened a box of hand grenades and threw them with both hands, pulling the pins out with his teeth. He didn't look where they went. As long as it was the other side of the wall, he didn't care. Other men followed his example, a profligate consumption of expensive objects. When life was measured in minutes, the price of things had a different meaning.

When he reached the bottom of the box, he tucked the last two in his pocket, drew his sword, and stood to face his doom.

A lull in the fighting. Thick white smoke masked everything more than a few feet away, and the ringing in his ears was unbearable. The wall had stopped vibrating, which told him someone had killed the last
Triceratops
. Blind and deaf, he stood uncertainly, waiting for a cue. Beside him a man reloaded his rifle.

Christopher felt the threat coming, tael-fueled instinct or perhaps just the pressure of air. Kneeling just in time, he let it sail over his head. Claws, leather, and a long tail whipped over him.

The Megaraptors leapt into the camp, using the dead
Triceratops
as stepping stones. They landed heavily, gathered themselves, and staggered forward to make room for more. Wading through men and wooden buildings, they smashed everything in their path.

Most of Christopher's men were on the walls, however. The Megaraptors had to stretch to reach them, yanking the unlucky ones by a leg and tossing them over their heads, where others snapped them out of the air and bit them in half. But the dinosaurs were only flesh and blood, if three times the size of warhorses. Under the withering fire, they began to fall. In their agonized death throes the dinosaurs demolished everything, including the stables. Horses panicked and fled, but it was for a good cause. The disoriented and angry dinosaurs snapped at the tasty horses, ignoring their riders' demands to focus on the real danger.

The riders wielded curved bows and lances to deadly effect, but their surprisingly effective armor and advanced rank only bought them four or five extra lives. They fell, one by one, and the problem began to reduce itself to manageable.

The south wall clattered with ladders again as the ulvenmen regrouped. Christopher worried that he had not brought enough grenades. But the six-inch guns opened up again, full of grape-shot, and the ulvenmen staggered back in confusion.

A pike tapped at the inside lip of the wall. Christopher leaned over to see what was up.

Charles drew his attention to Kennet, who was standing on a ladder and trying to hand up a box of grenades. Christopher pulled the heavy box in, stowed it against the wall. This time, when the ulvenmen came back, he only threw them one hand at a time. The pace of the battle had slowed, the wall and the smoke reducing everything to a series of individual encounters on a narrow stone path. His knew that his army survived because of the constant drumbeat of rifle fire, punctuated by cannons and grenades; he knew the ulvenmen were still there, because the only thing he could hear over the gunfire was their barks and howls.

More importantly, he knew that the ulvenman shaman had not committed himself to battle yet because the only flashes in the night were fueled by gunpowder. If he did see the streak of lightning, it would be his duty to run toward it.

Sometime in the night, he felt his magical strength desert him. That bothered him less than realizing he was out of grenades again.

Now a ladder poked up in front of him, and he had only his sword. He had finally run out of tricks. All the ulvenmen had to do now was keep pushing, and his army would crumble away in this acrid, thick darkness.

The man next to him attached his bayonet to his rifle and joined Christopher in front of the ladder.

“Don't be stupid,” Christopher shouted at him. “Go find some ammunition.”

Nodding, the soldier ran off into the smoke.

An ulvenman head appeared, and Christopher poked at it. He had a significant advantage here. The creature could only fight one-handed, since it had to use the other hand to hold onto the ladder. It decided to ignore him and tried to clamber over the top. Christopher's tael guided his thrust between the scales of its armor, and the sword sank deep into its belly.

He had to pull the sword out and beat the thing over the head a few more times before it fell off the ladder. By then the next ulvenman was climbing onto the lip of the wall.

He killed that one, ignoring the ax blow that cracked his helmet and diminished his tael. He killed the next one, too, but not without suffering another hit. They were coming too fast, the ones behind scampering over their dead and dying kin.

A soldier with a carbine walked up, shot the current ulvenman, leaned over the edge and fired five more times. Then he left, reloading as he went.

Before new ulvenmen appeared, the first soldier came back. Now they alternated shooting and stabbing the creatures, and Christopher fancied they could keep up. At least until he fainted from exhaustion. Leaning against the wall, panting, he tried to catch his breath in the acrid smoke.

After a few minutes, he realized something was wrong. He'd been resting for an unseemly length of time.

His companion was slumped, unmoving. Terrified that the sleep was magical, he kicked the man. But the soldier sprung wildly to his feet, ready to fight. He'd only been dozing.

Rifles still barked, intermittently. The cannons had gone silent, their crews waiting for something worth firing on.

Karl appeared out of the slowly thinning smoke. Glancing over the shambles of the fort, the bodies of men and animals strewn like spilled and bloody beans, he smiled at Christopher.

“I think we won.”

They waited anxiously for the next attack, the next wave of ulvenmen, the next surprise. When the air began to lighten, Christopher's heart skipped a beat, convinced for a second that this was some terrible magic that would grow until it blinded them and left them helpless.

But it was just the sunrise. This one, for a change, revealed a pretty sight: the plain in in front of them was bare save for corpses. The ulvenmen had withdrawn from the walls in the night and had apparently kept running.

Another twoscore of his men had been lost in the final assault. Finding what the dinosaurs had left of them was not as gruesome as Christopher had feared. The blood and gore was so uniformly spread over the ground that it lost its power to shock.

“You need to get some sleep,” Karl ordered. “And Disa too. We need your magic ready as soon as possible.” Not to cure the wounded; there were hardly any of those. The attacks had been so powerful that ordinary men either lived or died. Karl was expecting the ulvenmen to return.

And so was Christopher. Tossing and turning on his cot, he had nightmares of invisible, snarling wolf-men hiding in every corner, waiting for a secret signal to pounce.

Late in the afternoon he gave up trying to sleep and tried to meditate instead. Alone inside his tent, he was unable to shake off the fear of sudden attack. Eventually he moved outside, under the watchful eye of his soldiers, where he finally felt safe enough to pray.

His head full, he went to find their few wounded, but Disa had beaten him to it. After that terrible, brutal night, there were only the dead and the cheerfully whistling. He thought about an old
Star Trek
episode. War was supposed to be painful, so people would be encouraged not to do it. Even the winners were supposed to suffer.

But on this world, victory was complete. Your wounded would be healed, your dead would be revived, everything would be made bright and shiny again. As long as you kept winning, you might never even guess that there was a downside to perpetual violence. Well, unless you were a commoner; for them, war still meant pain and death.

And the upside, at least from the nobility's point of view, was presented to him fresh from the kettles, the product of the corpses strewn inside and outside the walls. A rock of tael as big as a peach.

He'd bet the farm and won. In one day and night he had doubled his fortune, taking from the field of battle more tael than he had begged, borrowed, and stolen in his entire career as a priest. In his hand he held enough tael to make him seventh-rank.

“I never even got the chance to call you Vicar,” Gregor laughed. That was the title for Christopher's sixth-rank, which hadn't even manifested itself yet.

Since Torme was otherwise occupied, Karl had to be the voice of gloom.

“Do not forget the tax you owe the King.”

That wasn't the only expense that came before Christopher could think about another promotion. “Can I deduct what I spend to revive the men?”

“No,” Gregor answered, rolling his eyes like Lalania always did. “The King comes first. He takes his quarter off the top.”

And Christopher had to add in the tael they had taken the night before. Even the tiny specks from the alligators had to be counted. A truth spell would not be fooled by accounting tricks.

There was another expense he knew he was going to make, so he might as well do it now. He went looking for Disa and found her in the camp kitchen. She was making herself useful trying to sort the crockery into heaps that could be mended and piles that couldn't. Breaking off a large lump of tael, he handed it to her.

“We still need you fourth-ranked. Some of these men are going to get infected, and I might not be able to cure disease quickly enough.” He could only do two a day, and that was only if he wasn't doing other things, like finding invisible ulvenmen or nullifying lightning bolts.

She stared at his generosity, holding the fortune as gently as an egg. Then she made an unexpected complaint.