Cinders of Magic

Chapter 4-3

With night approaching on the second day, the sky chilled and dropped waterstones from shadowed clouds overhead. Helmets came on, and shouting men worked to cover the trenches with planks of wood that had been brought up in the occasion of a stonefall. The stink of fresh battle washed away with the storm, and ice froze the cracks between planks over the heads of disgruntled soldiers. Still, the guns fired without pause.

Those packed into the trenches like salted meat packed into tins huddled together in their squads and sometimes would wander away to search the lines for wayward comrades that had become separated in the charge. Elias looked across bloodied faces. Whose blood it was that had dried on the cheeks of soldiers was difficult to tell at a glance. Eight of the six-seventy sat with him on crates that likely had been full of foodstuffs just before the charge had made it beyond the seventeenth wall.

The cards he had purchased two days prior came out and were worn well in the damp air for the day and a half that the storm persisted. Gambling was a virtue preached by the priests of the Highlord, and every man or woman on the northern front knew as many games of chance as names of the holy champions. Soldiers played for cigars, cigarettes, and the occasional bottle of alcohol, all of which were consumed as fast as they were won.

Officers walked the trenches, most with uniforms as ruddy and wrinkled as the men they oversaw. The occasional commissioned man still had the original white color to their uniform, the garment still resembling somewhat the item that had been originally issued them. Those men wore grave faces and paced as much as sat, keeping their quiet. They were of different armies, different battlefields, and had seen little of the trench warfare that had infected Orailse. The enlisted men of those armies had a similar air about them, but those men had the good grace to keep it from their faces. Only the eyes offered a glimpse into their true feelings.

None complained when the whiskey, brandy, or unlabeled liquor started making its way around. Beneath the beating of waterstones on half-frozen wood, no one expected an attack from the enemy, and none came.

By the light on the fourth day, the waterstones had stopped falling, and the sun began to melt the accumulation. Irrigation in the trenches was a tricky thing, and as many a soldier was put to digging new pathways for the runoff to travel as setting watch along the wall for a Sloanish charge. Again, none came.

Elias sat on the wall with a mirror to look over with, won in a game of chance, though he had lost the last of the tobacco he’d managed to save. The enemy was still at the nineteenth wall, though they seemed more hesitant than usual. Elias made a few wagers with men of other squads and won more than enough tobacco back by popping off the occasional curious head that popped up over the enemy’s wall with his rifle. Each time he peeked over to catch an unsuspecting man with a round in their face, a dagger flew from somewhere along the wall towards him; it never bothered him enough to stop him doing it, and the daggers never came close enough to so much as scratch him.

By mid-morning on the fourth day, the firing of the guns had picked up their pace once more, and runners came on from further back towards the city. Another charge was to come just as the sun fell over the horizon. The soldiers gathered themselves for it.

Again the fire came on like drumming, and with a massive crash, slammed into the enemy lines beyond the wall. Elias found himself not the first man to throw himself over the wall that time, and he was well in a way not the first man to reach the nineteenth wall. The men of the 4th and 8th armies were quick studies in the art of charging like madmen, and they had more youth in them than sense.

The days of artillery fire showed to have done little as the Fiorian lines surged over the wall. Sloanish cubes were set ready for the charge and caught too many of the first over the wall in their slicing expansion. The enemy that greeted them was few. They were already retreating from the sight of Fiorian gray, leaving traps for men to fall into behind them. Some of the officers tried to leash the chaos of the charge, to bring order to those that sped headlong with roaring cries to avoid the enemy traps, but they knew little about the charge. The charge was a wild thing, and it defied all attempts at taming.

The fleeing men ahead of the charge were so few that they inflicted outsized death on their attackers as they fell back. Most were picked off as they tried to make it over the twentieth wall by men that ran headlong over the boards the Sloanish had left to shelter beneath during the previous stonefall. No ogres reared up out of the trenches to stop the charge. No Sloanish channelers descended from unseen places or popped up out of the ground to reave the souls of men from their bodies. Nothing but unmanned hold rooms and hastily set traps tried to slow the Fiorian charge, and the gray army ate up the ground like a ravenous beast.

Confidence--the insidious hamstringer that is it--passed through the roaring grays as they ran. The army trampled the bodies of razorbacks as they threw themselves at the last wall. Elias was among them, no less caught in the enthusiasm of sighting the last wall as any other soldier in the charge, and was among one of the first over the wall; he ignored the stabbing in his leg that itched at the outside of his awareness. The sight beyond the wall was one he had not seen in so many years that, at first, he thought it not real.

His muddied boots came down on soft grass as when he threw himself over the last stone feature, and the horizon stretched out before him without trench lines. The remnants of fires still burned in large pits, and the tents that had not been packed away in time still stood among what had been the Sloanish camp only a day before. There was a smell on the air that mixed with the dampness of the melting waterstones, the smell of meat that had been chucked in fires, and of bones that had long sizzled there. The night was still. It seemed, at that moment, the moon broke through the clouds overhead and shone a green glow across the field before him. The charge died with a startled cry, and men came to linger among the tents in the following confusion. The trenches, it seemed, had been conquered.