Cinders of Magic

Chapter 4-2

The men at the wall moved aside for Elias to slap his own back to the wall and gave his squad the same courtesy. Only one man, Davif, had been struck with a Sloanish dagger as they made the approach, and the man pulled it from his shoulder with a wide grin. All told, they had done well to make their destination without losing a man. They were ahead of the guns.

The day slowed to a rhythmic pulsing of the battlefield that gradually picked up its racing as the oncoming rush approached. Every soldier felt it, knew its meaning, and their hearts were pulled along in the wake of the firing. The enemy knew it as well. The guns reached their crescendo, and in the same beat that followed, the daggers stopped falling from the sky. Breath held along the trench line, and silence swept down with the whisper of the wind.

On all sides of Elias, men clenched their weapons in white knuckles and held their teeth together tightly enough to whine. Some did as he, let their rifles fall against their shoulders and put their hands over their ears. It did little to help, the wall itself was more buffer than the inch or two of flesh over the ears, but it was human instinct that drove men to cover themselves and brace. Elias seldom ignored instinct.

A great shuddering came as every Fiorian artillery gun fired at once. The earth barked miles ahead of where the soldiers could still see with their backs pressed against the coolness of stone, a fountain of dirt spraying up from the simultaneous explosions. Shells could be picked out then, a volley that passed beneath the white plumes of clouds with a whistle like arrows in flight. When they landed beyond the fourteenth wall, beyond the fifteenth, a second shuddering of the earth followed and blew dirt as harshly as it did wind.

Sudden heat pressed through the wind and seemed to cling to the cold stone. A vibration came through stone and earth alike to settle into the men to the point of deafening. Far off, there was yelling, but the whistle of passing missiles bleated in Elias’s ears without end to drown all the rest of the world out.

Elias grabbed hold of the wall’s edge amidst the chaos to haul himself over. He couldn’t hear the firing of the guns past the whine, couldn’t feel the jolting impacts through the vibration, couldn’t tell if another man had moved with him over the wall in the chaos, but he knew the guns had fallen silent. The charge had begun.

Dust swirled in the air ahead of his charge, kicked up all at once by the final volley, and came to rest like a brown fog. Blessedly, the guns had made good use of their spotters, and the wall they had aimed for stood in blasted ruin where any remained at all. None of the Sloanish managed to pull themselves from the explosions in time to take him as he crossed the open ground, and when he fell among them on the other side of the fifteenth wall, only one man in four had sense enough to recognize the gray of his uniform.

Standing atop the wall trench would have earned Elias a belly full of Sloanish daggers before he had felled two men, and in the ruddy lines of cut earth, he managed only two shots before abandoning his rifle to the close quarters. Gray uniforms fell in around him as the fighting became a frenzied melee, Fiorian soldiers armed with sharpened spades against Sloanish knife fighters. Half the enemy managed to die on their feet fighting, the other half--too shocked by explosions or struggling to dig their way out of collapsed bunkers they’d used to hole up from the onslaught of artillery--didn’t. Those men caught with hands peeking through the dirt were ended with a patient shot or left until the churning earth stopped its struggling.

The swell of shrieking men came on harder than Elias had ever seen before. Badges from foreign armies joined the wild charge, hacked with spades dulled from use in the earth, or fired from atop the trench lines where they took an equal amount of return fire. In the rushing roar of the melee, there was no time to seek comrades or form squads against the fleeing enemy. Shots were taken at the backs of men in dagger-covered cloaks, short-handled shovels split skulls, and somewhere in between the odd bayonet skewered legs and then bellies once men had fallen to the dirt.

The six-seventy found their leader in the confusion. Roan, the strong and squat man with a beard as crimson as blood, roared orders over the din to keep close. Biddy took long-odd shots through the mass at turning enemies backed into corners like wild animals. Hlia brought spade down hard enough to split men from side to navel at Elias’s side to keep him safe on his blind side; the right half of his face was covered with blood from a shallow cut on his brow. In the front of it, all Elias screamed as he raced on, weaving between spade and rifle like a cloud of death. Men gave themselves up before him as if he were Canes, the Lowlord, come to claim their souls for his armies in the endless battle.

The surge pushed on, and then it was crawling up the sides of dirt walls at the edge of the sixteenth wall with destroyed ladders all around. Soldiers chased the backs of retreating enemies and were met with flying blades as they crested the wall.

One man, Gin, Elias knew, tripped over a black cube left in the dirt on the other side of the wall. The cube expanded impossibly quick to become five feet across, and where it touched Gin’s body, it made him part of it. The top half of Gin fell away from the cube with the parts of a man that should never see the sun strewn behind him. Gin squealed a high sound that was more stuck pig than man, his hands clawing at the earth ahead of him. Roan put a round in the back of the man’s head as he found him around the other side of the cube to still his suffering.

The craters past the wall were old for the most part, partially filled in with pooled water or fresh dirt. The race towards the seventeenth wall came with a flurry of daggers shot from the far side. Soldiers stopped to kneel and fire from their rifles as their comrades ran on, sending heads and shoulders spraying with red gore beyond the wall. Men, Fiorian and Sloanish alike, twitched on the ground, grasped for ankles, and begged for aid from the charging soldiers.

Desperate courage held a grip over the soldiers as they ran into death to leap the wall where men in dagger-filled cloaks fired at them. The melee returned, and with it, the battle temper compelled soldiers to chop at each other with whatever they could lay hand on. More than one Fiorian soldier wielded the swords some Sloanish men carried that were barbed at the end like a fishing hook. The press of gray-clad flesh overwhelmed the Sloanish battlelines with its swell, and the retreating fight started up flight again along the dark halls of the trenches.

There were more enemies in among the unstruck trench and tunnels, but the frenzy was upon the Fiorians, and they chased the barbarians with the madness of hounds on bloodhunt. A vague flash of gray, brown, and crimson passed in Elias’s consciousness before he was before the eighteenth wall, hunting after the enemy. A vague part of his mind called out for him to stop. Taking three walls in a day was more than could have been hoped for. Elias ignored that; the momentum was on him, and things like caution were as distant as his hometown.

As he climbed the side of the wall on an unbroken ladder miraculously reclaimed from the muck, a great stone hand came down atop a man three arms lengths down along the wall. A stone head came next, misshapen in a man’s likeness and unfeatured to where only the divots of eyeholes and a protrusion that might be a nose could be seen. White and shining in reflected sunlight, a quartz gem marred the stone where the giant’s mouth should have been. The stone hand grabbed the broken man, fingers big around as a man’s forearm, and tossed the body at a woman who had not yet noticed its presence. The stone golem, the ogre, fell over the wall on what qualified as its back to crush the rush of soldiers in the trench below. The ogre pushed itself to four reticulated legs made of six boulders and stood high enough to see clearly over the wall, even from the bottom of the trench. Among the gray soldiers, it began to murder.

More ogres followed the first over the wall, dropping with earth-shaking impacts among soldiers and swinging arms through the press of men. Most ran at first sight of ogres, retreating over the bodies of enemies and comrades alike to be away from the monsters. Others turned and fired on the ogres, knowing that cracking the quartz embedded on the creature would bring it down, but bearing rifles ineffective for the job.

A channeler moved out of the press with impossible alacrity, rifle firing great blooms of fire that exploded across the stone monsters. He brought down one of the ogres, the one nearest to where Elias still clung to the ladder, with a bullet that erupted into an explosion when it struck home. He wheeled on another, rifle flicking three rapid explosions into another before running dry. The channeler charged the ogre with a shimmering light blossoming from his hand. The rocky edifice of the ogre simmered with heat where the light touched it and turned molten red when it began to melt. The ogre felt no pain, and the channeler neared too close to it, trying to melt the monster. Two stone hands came down on him, ripping him in half.

More channelers emerged from the retreating lines to do battle with enemies only they could defeat. From atop the trench lines, great guns were wheeled forwards in teams of six strong men and opened fire on the mountainous enemy with bullets like cigars. The blasting of the wheel guns halted soldiers and cut over the panic that swept through them at the sight of ogres. They turned, firing on the Sloanish that climbed over the walls in their countercharge, the rifles of mortal men enough to bring them flailing over the wall to die. The wheel guns hit the quartz they were aimed towards seldomly, but the rounds that chipped into the ogres unbalanced them enough to allow the channelers easy killing blows.

Elias lept from the ladder to catch the edge of the trench line opposite the wall and haul himself up. The yellow and green of the Sloanish came over the wall like a flood and was met by gunfire thick enough to see. The vanguard of ogres was pressed back to the wall of the trenches and then crushed with precision even as more tried to spill over.

Ammunition was used up, and the dead became so thick at the wall’s height that the enemy was left to climb over still bodies to reach over. Those that ran dry on rounds stripped the bracers that propelled Sloanish knives at deadly speed through the air from Sloanish bodies to launch inaccurate shots over the wall.

Time uncounted passed. In the end, the Fiorian’s held at the edge of the eighteenth wall. At some point, the sun dipped past the horizon, and the artillery guns picked up their fire once more to press the Sloanish lines back into the ground around the last two walls. The battle paused for the moment. Men stood or sat in stunned silence a handspan away from the soon-to-be rotting dead. The rest of the Fiorian armies followed on the heels of the men they’d sent to lead the charge and started the work of fortifying reconquered ground. Those that came up behind ignored the charging men, for the most part, busying themselves about clearing the dead; it took until the middle of the next day to finish the work.