In the Shadow of Lightning

30

It was late in the afternoon and Idrian stared out across the Copper Hills west of Ossa, playing a game with himself: Which shadows flitting across the fallow fields were caused by the clouds, and which were caused by the aching madness locked away in the corner of his brain? He could feel the madness pushing at the restraining sorcery of his godglass eye like a prisoner probing at the bars of his cell, and Idrian wondered how much longer he had until the eye just didn’t work anymore. Could he handle the madness on his own? Should he tell Tadeas, or the Ministry of the Legion, how quickly his mind seemed to be degrading?

Or was he imagining all of it? The eye still had plenty of resonance. It should last for several more years. Perhaps Tadeas was right and his mind was just coping with the loss of Kastora. If he could push through it – get to the end of this war and turn in his debt marker – he could use Demir’s phoenix channel to recharge his godglass.

“Sir?”

Idrian started out of his reverie, turning to find Braileer at his side. “Hmm?”

“You were grimacing, sir. Is something wrong?”

“Just thinking of friends long gone.” It was an easy lie. He usually was.

“Oh. Do you dwell on them often?”

“More than I’d like to admit.”

Braileer sat down on a rock next to Idrian and the two remained in companionable silence for some time before Braileer spoke again. “Will I dwell on lost friends, sir?”

It was a surprisingly poignant question. Idrian was used to young recruits coming in and thinking they were invincible; that they and their friends would see the end of whatever next war without anything more than a few sexy scars. They were always disabused of that notion violently, and some of them broke for it. “How long have you been with us?”

“Just six days, sir.”

“Have you been getting to know the battalion?”

“As much as I can, sir. I think I understand the engineers better than the soldiers. We all work with our hands. We take things apart and make and mend.” He paused. “But Mika terrifies me.”

“She should,” Idrian chuckled. “She’s just as insane as the rest of us veterans, but she has access to explosives. Have you fallen in with anyone? People you eat breakfast with, or throw down a bedroll near?”

Braileer looked down at his hands. “Do you know Steph and Halion?”

Steph and Halion were a pair of siblings; engineers underneath Mika, both with the rank of corporal. “Steph take you under her wing, hmm?” Idrian asked, bemused.

“More like Halion,” Braileer said slowly, blushing. “I think he likes me. Steph giggles and elbows him every time I’m around.”

Idrian breathed out through his nose. It was easy to remember how quickly these things happened when you were young. The terror of the battlefield; the loneliness of being away from home; the need for some respite from blood and suffering. He considered his next words, trying to keep them from coming out too dour. “My best advice for you is that people will die. You’ll lose friends. Maybe just one. Maybe all of them. But it will happen. You get used to it, kind of, but it always hurts. Have your fun – piss knows we all need it – but guard this well.” He leaned over to thump Braileer’s chest over his heart.

Braileer swallowed hard. “I’ll try, sir.”

“Good.” Idrian scratched at his godglass eye, feeling that itch in the back of the socket. “Now make sure my armor is polished. We’re going to see battle sooner than any of us wants.” He got up and headed to the pavilion, where Tadeas had laid out one of his bean maps to represent the defensive array of the Ossan Foreign Legion. Idrian joined Tadeas in staring at that array until his friend finally turned to him.

Tadeas gestured at the bean map. “This whole thing. It’s too…” He snapped his fingers thoughtfully. “… too by-the-book.”

“You think Kerite can unseat us?”

“I don’t know about that,” Tadeas responded, “but from what I know about Kerite, she’s read the handbooks and she’s found them lacking. General Stavri thinks he can lure her in and crush her with a straightforward battle. I’ll be surprised if it’s that easy.”

“What’s the latest word?” Idrian asked. The itching behind his godglass eye grew in intensity. He’d never truly known if he had a sixth sense, or if he’d just been doing this so long that he had a subconscious feel for the winds of war.

“Last I heard, Kerite is hanging back about four miles to our west. The Drakes have been reinforced by soldiers from Grent. The numbers are about even, if you count our National Guard reinforcements. She’s going to give us battle but we don’t know when. Tonight? Tomorrow? Kerite has always been unpredictable.”

Idrian tore his eyes from the bean map and looked over at his friend. Tadeas was clearly exhausted, his shoulders slumped, a frown fixed on his face for the last forty-eight hours. Like Idrian, he was covered in dirt from helping dig trenches all morning and afternoon.

Despite Mika’s insistence that it would take three days to finish the fortifications, they were almost done. A web of dirt barricades and ditches filled with wooden spikes now protected their artillery battery, and that was only some of it. Mika’s engineers had carefully laid mines all across the hillside, marked for the soldiers under their command but otherwise hard to spot, as the sod had been taken up and then carefully replaced. If you cared to look closely enough, you’d spot the blasting cord winding through the thick grass, coming up the hill to the “blasting wheel,” as Mika liked to call it.

They were by far the most advanced fortifications along the entire defensive line, and Idrian worried that the rest of the army wasn’t taking Kerite’s threat very seriously.

“Tad!” a voice called. It belonged to a scrawny woman of medium height, well into her forties. Her name was Forsel Pergos, but everyone called her Halfwing. Idrian had no idea why. She wore the black Ossan uniform with a yellow patch on her shoulders shaped like a stack of cannonballs. “Come up here!”

Tadeas sighed. “No rest for the weary, eh?”

“Come on, she looks nervous,” Idrian said, tugging Tadeas by the shoulder. The pair walked to the crown of the hill, flattened days ago by the artillery crews and now filled with a number of cannons and mortars. Neat, pyramid-shaped stacks of ammunition stood beside each weapon. The crews were off having an early dinner, but their commanding officer stood alone among the big guns, waving to them eagerly.

Idrian and Tadeas joined her. “Everything okay?” Idrian asked.

Halfwing paced around a stack of cannonballs, a piece of sightglass in her ear and a looking glass in her hand. She paused, turned toward the north, and pointed at a copse of trees on a hilltop about a mile away. “I swear,” she said, “I just saw a Grent dragoon in those trees.”

Idrian took her offered looking glass and raised it to his one eye, peering through until he found the trees. It was a tight bit of landscape, all thorns and overgrown olive trees forgotten for a hundred years or more. There really wasn’t much to see – a man might be able to scramble his way into that mess, but a man and a horse?

“We should already have scouts in those trees,” Tadeas said. Idrian handed him the looking glass. Tadeas looked in that direction, then did a general sweep of the surrounding hills. “In fact, we should have a lot more scouts than I can see right now.”

Idrian looked toward the sun. It was almost six o’clock, with the winter darkness not far off and the evening already growing noticeably colder. He felt a knot form in his stomach. “Is Kerite making her move?”

“Glassdamned hard to tell,” Tadeas responded, “and if she is we shouldn’t be the ones figuring it out. Stavri should have hundreds of scouts sweeping these hills, keeping us abreast of everything. Kerite shouldn’t be able to break camp without us knowing.”

“And what was our last report?” Halfwing asked. She wrung her hands, looking nervous. Artillery officers were a strange breed, one that Idrian had never quite gotten used to: completely unfazed by massive explosions and pieces of iron moving at impossible speeds, but ready to flee at the slightest change of plans. Considering how much work it took to prepare a single artillery battery, he didn’t blame them for the latter.

“The last report,” Tadeas said, still sweeping the distant horizon with Halfwing’s looking glass, “was that Kerite had made camp and was conducting practice drills. No communication. No betrayal of her plans. That was around noon.”

The itch behind Idrian’s godglass eye only grew more severe. Maybe Halfwing had imagined the dragoon, or even spotted a single Grent scout hiding out in that copse. Maybe Kerite was still several miles distant, running her troops through their paces for a morning battle. That was what any traditional commander would do. But Kerite wasn’t a traditional commander.

“Give me that glass,” he said, taking the looking glass from Tadeas. He fixed it back on that copse, then slowly moved it down the side of the hill. What he saw then made his blood freeze: there was a woman in black Ossan uniform, mostly hidden by the tall grasses, crawling her way down the side of the hill. Once Idrian had found the soldier he could see the trail of broken grass behind her. The grass was bloody, there was no mistaking it. “Halfwing, get your crews back to their stations.”

“What’s going on?” Tadeas asked.

Idrian handed him back the looking glass once more. “Look down the hill from that copse. Glassdamned Kerite is killing our scouts.” He was running before he’d finished the sentence. “Braileer!” he bellowed. “Prepare my armor! I–” He was cut off by the sight of something out of the corner of his eye. Turning, he watched as a whole company of dragoons suddenly emerged from behind the trees, coming over the hill and thundering directly toward their position.

Tadeas was already screaming at the top of his lungs. “Sound the alarm! Kerite is upon us! Every soldier to their post!”

The dragoons swept down the hill and across the valley, and rode hard to flank the artillery battery before Tadeas’s troops were in position. Idrian was half in his armor, Braileer fiddling with the buckles, when they heard the first mine go off. Idrian counted four more in quick succession, their blasts mixed with the bone-chilling sound of screaming horses and then followed by an irregular exchange of gunfire. By the time he returned, joining Tadeas in a commander’s dugout just below the artillery, the hillside was covered with at least fifty dead or wounded dragoons. The rest had already turned tail, withdrawing beyond the range of the Ironhorns’ muskets.

They wore orange-and-white Grent uniforms. Kerite, it seemed, had sent her Grent employers to do her dirty work.

The small victory turned sour in Idrian’s mouth as he realized that, without Mika’s mines, those dragoons would likely have overrun the hilltop before a proper defense could be mustered. It was a masterful flanking maneuver. He might have pointed out how well Mika’s positioning had worked to Tadeas if not for the fact that infantry now poured over the hills to the west. Those directly across from the Ironhorns wore the orange and white of the Grent, while those attacking their opposite flank flew the blue-and-green mercenary flag of Kerite’s Drakes.

Idrian searched for Braileer, only to find the young armorer hurrying toward him carrying his hammerglass buckler and smallsword. “You,” Idrian told him, “haven’t seen open battle yet. Keep your eyes on me at all times, but don’t follow if I break rank. This isn’t street fighting – no hanging on my heels to watch my back. Remain here with Tadeas. Be ready with bandages and extra cureglass if I’m forced to retreat.”

“Yes, sir!”

“Good. Don’t die. I’m starting to like you.” Idrian found a lump of wax in his pocket and handed half of it to Braileer. Below the Ironhorns, the Ossan forces sounded the alarm, soldiers scrambling over each other to reach their positions while cartloads of glass were expedited to a spot just behind the front lines, where glassdancers readied themselves for the battle.

“We should have bloody well known better,” Tadeas swore. “Attacking right at twilight. Glassdamned Kerite caught us with our pants down. This is gonna be bloody as piss.”

It was the last thing Idrian heard clearly before stuffing wax into his ears, mere moments before the first cannon fired over his head. The blast shook him to the core, making his muscles hurt, and the sorceries mixing in his helmet allowed him the visual dexterity to follow the cannonball as it arced across the valley and slammed into the center of the Grent formation. The ball did not skip as it should, embedding itself into the hillside, and he could hear Halfwing’s muffled shouts as she ordered corrections. Within moments the entire artillery battery was thumping away.

The glassdancers began their own attack just moments later. Sheets of glass, squares wider than a man was tall, shot from the hillside, propelled by invisible sorcery like kites high into the air, where they broke into sword-sized shards and began to fall on the Grent infantry. Each sheet could kill a whole platoon if undefended, but when the shards came to within a dozen feet of the infantry’s heads they were redirected harmlessly away by Grent’s own glassdancers.

The Grent infantry moved at an astonishing pace, barely fazed by either the glassdancers or the artillery attacks. Not even a glassdamned waver, and that alone made Idrian nervous.

The Grent closed to within firing distance of the Ossan line, where they pulled up suddenly and let off a withering barrage at the still-addled Ossan soldiers. Black smoke rose from both sides. A trumpet sounded, and breachers suddenly burst from the Grent formation. Idrian felt his eyes widen in astonishment as he counted – ten, twenty. He lost track at thirty and there might have been four times that many. They crossed the hundred yards between the two armies at a sprint that would make a racehorse jealous. In moments they were among the Ossan infantry, engaging Idrian’s fellow breachers at close quarters.

Idrian fought the urge to race down that hill and engage them. They weren’t his responsibility.

Someone was shouting at him, and he dug the wax from his ears long enough to hear Halfwing say, “The south battery has gone quiet! There’s no communication!”

Idrian swallowed a lump in his throat, exchanged a glance with Tadeas, and then leapt from the commander’s dugout. He ran around to a spot on the back of the hill, well behind his own artillery. A thousand National Guardsmen reinforcements waited just down the slope in loose formation, probably praying they wouldn’t have to actually see combat today. From here Idrian could see across the four other hilltops that made up the core of the Ossan defense. Each had an artillery battery, and the center hilltop was marked by the large Foreign Legion flag with another, smaller flag showing General Stavri’s silic sigil.

It wasn’t that that concerned him. The farthest hill, way out on the southern flank of the Ossan defense nearly a mile away, was swarming with cuirassiers and dragoons wearing the blue and green of Kerite’s mercenary company. The standards had fallen, the artillery battery overwhelmed even as the battle had only just begun. No doubt they had been hit by the same flanking maneuver as the Ironhorns, and had been less prepared for it.

Idrian’s heart was in his throat. He turned to sprint back to Tadeas only to come up short. Around that same copse that had screened the earlier dragoons came Grent cuirassiers, the thunder of their hooves lost beneath the sound of Idrian’s own artillery. There were at least six hundred of them and they were coming hard, but not to the position their fellow cavalry had already tested. They were headed straight toward the poorly trained, poorly prepared National Guard reserves. If they fled, there would be no one to protect the rear of the hill, where Mika hadn’t planted any mines and the earthen fortifications were few.

“Tadeas!” Idrian shouted between cannon blasts. “Look to your rear!”

He didn’t wait for orders, acting on pure instinct, knowing that a single moment of hesitation would cost him his courage. He could see the National Guard officers trying to form up their troops to meet a cavalry charge, though half of them didn’t even have their bayonets fixed. The National Guard wavered.

Idrian’s feet barely touched the ground, eating up the yards, pushing himself harder and harder lest the reserves break before he could even reach them.

“National Guard, with me!” he roared, the words tearing his throat raw. He was close to their position now, and he angled himself to take the cuirassiers head-on. The ground shook from their charge and they seemed to be a wall of horses, men, and glinting breastplates adorned with blue hammerglass and the orange streamers of the Grent ducal house.

What could one breacher do to arrest that charge? But he did not stop. He could not afford to. He was the Ram, and if he relented then good soldiers would die.

He leapt the front line, coming up even with the riders for half a second, his shield clipping a cuirassier on his left and tearing her from her horse while his sword dipped and cut a jagged swath through man and horse on his right. He landed, rolled out of the way of charging hooves, then thrust out his sword like a stick through the spokes of a wagon wheel. It was a chaotic, bloody dance as he darted between the stampeding animals. He dodged horses, ducked swords, and threw himself out of the way of a lance. All the while his own sword dipped and swayed, slicing through anything that came within reach – extended arms, legs in the stirrups, and horse legs. Lots of horse legs, vivisecting themselves on his razorglass with little actual effort on his part.

The screaming of horses would stay with him for weeks. It always did.

As suddenly as the charge had arrived, it was past him, and Idrian found himself standing in the center of a bloody charnel house of the dead and dying. There were dozens of fallen cavalry around him, but was that enough? He swung around to find that the cuirassiers had hit the National Guardsmen as intended. But their charge had hesitated, the heart cut out of it, and despite the guardsmen’s disarray they had managed to keep the cuirassiers from cracking them entirely. Even as Idrian watched, the cuirassiers slowed, stopped, and then began to pull back.

They found him waiting for them, and he made them pay for their flanking gambit. By the time they had fully disengaged, less than half of them remained – and those took further losses, as over a hundred of the Ironhorns had come to Idrian’s aid. The Ironhorns marched in a tight square, rotating musketmen firing on the retreating cavalry.

Idrian found Valient in the center of the square, but his fellow captain just waved him on. “I’ll make sure the National Guardsmen hold!” Valient shouted. “Get back to Tadeas!”

Idrian did as he was told, and it didn’t take more than a glance as he joined Tadeas in the commander’s dugout to see that everything had gone wrong. The Ossan front lines … simply didn’t exist anymore. The Grent and their infantry had rolled right over them, and the secondary line, and the tertiary. Ossan soldiers fled openly, running up the hill toward the Ironhorns or across the open valley on their flank, where the fools would be run down by what remained of those cuirassiers. He couldn’t even see the brightly embroidered black uniforms of any Ossan glassdancers left down there.

Tadeas stared at Idrian’s gore-soaked armor without comment. “Just got signals from General Stavri,” he said coolly. “Both southern batteries have fallen and he’s being hard-pressed. He’s ordered us to hitch up the artillery and withdraw immediately.”

“Already?” Idrian breathed, hearing the wondrous despair in his own voice. The Foreign Legion was not some slouching provincial force. They were the best soldiers in the world, and they’d just been absolutely destroyed by a couple of Grent brigades and an equal number of foreign mercenaries. Not even at his most pessimistic had he imagined this going so badly. “If we pull out now,” Idrian said, pointing his sword down the hill, “every man and woman of ours down there will be dead by midnight.”

“We’re to take great pains to save the artillery pieces,” Tadeas said.

“Piss on the artillery pieces. What about the glassdamned soldiers?”

“Agreed.” Tadeas swung around, barking orders. “Kess, get our standard up to the top of the hill! As high as you can get it, and wave it like your glassdamned life depends on it! Halfwing, switch to grapeshot and put it just over our heads. Just over, hear me? I want our comrades to feel the breeze in their hair. Dristus, tell Valient to get his ass back here and to bring those National Guard reserves with him!”

Idrian watched the soldiers snap to their orders and then turned his gaze on Tadeas. Tadeas squared his jaw, inhaling sharply as he looked down at the swiftly collapsing battlefield. He said, “We form a wedge around the artillery and we get everyone we can inside that wedge, then we withdraw at our leisure. Understand?”

“Understood,” Idrian said, taking a shaky breath and looking down at the Grent breachers now coming up the slope, knee-deep in the gore from slaughtering fleeing Ossan infantry. “I’ll buy us time.”

“Sir,” Braileer called, “if you go down there, you might not come back.”

“That’s my job, armorer,” Idrian replied. “Horns ready, hooves steady. Give me some noise.”

“Ironhorns!” Tadeas shouted. “We have the Ram!”

“We have the Ram!” Mika repeated from her spot with the engineers.

“We have the Ram!” someone shouted. The call was repeated up and down the line until it became a chant. “Os-sa! Os-sa! Os-sa!”

The artillery fell silent as Halfwing and her crews switched to grapeshot. Idrian leapt onto the front fortification of the commander’s dugout and slammed his sword against his shield with the tempo of the chant. Three times, roaring wordlessly into the wind, until he was sure that every soldier within three hundred yards was looking directly at him.

“To us!” he shouted. “To the Ironhorns!”

“To the Ironhorns! Os-sa! To the Ironhorns!” The call washed down the hillside like an avalanche, putting hammerglass into the spines of the fleeing Ossan soldiers. Idrian let himself be seen for a few more moments until he heard Halfwing shout to Tadeas.

“Artillery ready!”

Idrian leapt from the commander’s dugout, barreling down the hillside. Ossan soldiers jumped from his path, cheering him on, and he hit the first Grent breacher with the force of a runaway carriage, their shields connecting with a reverberating boom. Idrian plowed over the poor bastard, dipping his sword back to finish the job, only barely slowing his run.

The next was not so easy, dodging Idrian’s bulk and forcing him into a duel. It was short and brutal, and Idrian caught the breacher’s sword on his own hammerglass, splitting several inches into his shield, before taking her legs out from under her.

Idrian sliced his way through an entire company of Grent infantry who were so intent on bayoneting Ossan soldiers in the back that they didn’t even see him coming. Their breacher reacted too slowly, then tried to get the high ground on Idrian, turning his back toward the Ironhorns. He was rewarded with a bullet to the back of the head, no doubt fired by one of Valient’s marksmen. Idrian spotted a Grent glassdancer, marked out by the orange epaulets on his uniform. The glassdancer was staring right at him, and Idrian threw himself to the ground.

A shard of glass the size of Idrian’s hand sliced through the air where he’d been standing. It stopped in midair, reversing direction, and Idrian lured it to within feet of him before bringing up his shield. The glass hit his shield with surprisingly little force, shattering into a thousand little shards that even the best glassdancer would have a hard time controlling. Idrian ducked and weaved, conscious that a new attack could come from any direction, and charged. The best defense against a glassdancer was not that dissimilar to the defense against a marksman: give them a moving target, get them riled up, and hope their concentration slipped.

It did, and the last thing Idrian saw of the man before he took his head was the nervous sweat pouring down his brow.

The clash continued through the last of the twilight as the Grent advance slowly stalled and then finally retreated, cut down by the score by Halfwing’s grapeshot. A lone flare suddenly lit the night, and Idrian could see that he was practically alone. Every soldier who could still run had made it to the Ironhorn lines. The hillside was slick with blood, jumbled with corpses.

Below them, just out of reach of Halfwing’s grapeshot, the Grent infantry were re-forming. They would assault the hill once more, and this time there would be nothing between them and the Ironhorns.

Idrian sprinted back up the hill to find Tadeas and Braileer still in the commander’s dugout. The artillery had gone silent once again, and though the pieces were still there, the crews were gone. In fact, everyone seemed to have pulled out, or was in the process of doing so, the wounded and harried fleeing down a safe corridor of National Guardsmen. Braileer took Idrian’s shield and reached up to fix an extra piece of cureglass to his ear. Idrian let him.

“They’re coming, boss,” Mika shouted from her blasting wheel.

“We out?” Idrian asked Tadeas.

“We’re out. To piss with General Stavri, to piss with the Assembly, and to piss with the Grent. We just saved at least a thousand legionaries and it cost us a few artillery pieces to do, so my conscience is clear.”

Over at the blasting wheel, Mika struck a match and touched it to something, which began to burn and crackle furiously. “Slow-burning fuse,” she explained to Braileer, shielding her eyes from the light as she peered down into the valley. “If they maintain that march, all my mines will go off right as they reach this dugout.”

Idrian looked pointedly to several barrels of powder at Mika’s feet. They were connected by blasting cord to her slow-burning fuse. “Those aren’t mines.”

“Can’t leave our artillery pieces for the enemy, now can we?” Tadeas replied. He slapped Idrian on the shoulder. “You did your part. Let’s go.”

Idrian paused to look back down into the darkness. The hillside seemed to writhe with the wounded, many of whom would not see the morning, and beyond that he could see the newly re-formed rows of Grent infantry marching toward them from the west. Kerite’s Drakes moved forward in a pincer movement from the southwest. There were breachers and glassdancers among them – far too many to fight. The next hill over was almost overrun, the last of that battalion holding on just long enough that the Ironhorns didn’t take it in the flank.

Idrian waved his thanks to them, though he knew they could not see it, then followed Tadeas and Mika as they left the artillery battery at a run.

He was so tired he didn’t even look back when the entire hilltop exploded behind them.