Blood and Mud

Chapter 38: Chapter 38

As I previously said, Chapters will be shorter from now on, but starting next month i will try to upload 2 of them each day; it depends on how much my feedback professor likes me.

The mud tasted like a coin held too long on the tongue, with something rotten underneath it. I’d stopped noticing around midday. You stop noticing most things around midday.

I was leaning on the hilt of my sword because my legs had quietly filed a complaint and stopped taking instructions. Around me the world was doing what it had been doing for hours — a wall of noise so constant it had gone past sound and become a kind of pressure, something you felt in your teeth more than heard.

Ten minutes ago I had worked out a clean retreat line to the second position, down to the minute my stamina would give out.

Then I saw a gap in their shield wall and threw the plan away and went for it, because apparently that’s who I am now.

I wiped my eyes with the back of a wrist that was mostly someone else’s blood, and the rune along my blade gave a faint, tired crackle against my palm. I wanted ten seconds. Just ten seconds where nothing was trying to kill anyone.

I didn’t get them. But I’ll tell you how I got here.

Dawn had come up grey and wet, and with it, the size of the thing.

I’d read the number in the dispatch tent the night before and thought I understood it. Two hundred and ten thousand men in Imperial grey, drawn up across the flat in lines so exact they looked drawn with a ruler, pikes catching what little light there was. I did not understand it. You cannot understand a number like that from a piece of paper. You have to stand at one edge of it and fail to see the other edge.

Across the mud, out of the mist, waited a hundred and seventy thousand who didn’t care for lines at all.

The 5th held the right flank, backed up against a stand of dead swamp trees, bark gone silver and stripped like old bone. I had Kaelen on my left, shield up, built like something that had been quarried rather than born. Yuni on my right, spear held at the one angle that matters. Around us, a cluster of younger Dormant Buds, shaking in their boots, all of them considerably worse at hiding it.

I gave them the smile. The good one.

”Logically,” I said, ”dying in a swamp is terrible for the complexion. Let’s not, today.”

A couple of them actually laughed, which I’ll take. None of them could see that the smile was doing a job — that underneath it my heart was going like something trying to get out through my ribs, that I would have traded every scrap of whatever the Empire thinks I am for one locked door and something to read. Nobody enlists a bookish sort of person into four hundred thousand souls’ worth of front line and expects her to enjoy it. I have simply learned to look like I do.

Then the horn was sound, and there wasn’t time to think about any of that again for a long while.

Kaelus’s trebuchets went first — great looping shapes of fire, each one big enough to have levelled a house, if there’d been a house left standing anywhere in this basin. The Coalition’s answer came up out of the ground itself. Their shamans dragged roots the width of my waist straight up through the mud to catch the fire mid-air, and where root met flame the whole line went up in a boiling, poisonous green-black fog that swallowed the front ranks whole.

Then the horns, and both walls of men simply walked into each other.

I fought on whatever’s left when thinking stops being useful. A big man came at me out of the fog with a halberd gone orange with rust, screaming something I didn’t catch and didn’t need to. For half a heartbeat I had the whole clean answer laid out — step left, catch the shaft, turn him, disarm — a lovely five-move sequence I would have been proud of on a training floor.

Then he was much closer than the training floor had ever been, and I forgot every step of it and just swung.

It was an ugly swing. Wide, off-balance, the kind of thing Miklas would have stopped my drills for. But the rune caught his halberd shaft on the way through and the current ran straight up his arms, and his whole body seized like a puppet with its strings yanked. That was the gap. I turned the blade in my hand and put it through his throat before he came back to himself.

He went down into the mud and I felt — nothing, really. No weight on my chest, no whispered apology. There isn’t room down here for any of that. There’s only the next ten seconds, and whether you’re breathing at the end of them.

That went on. I don’t know for how long. I know Kaelen’s shield kept slamming into things to my left and Yuni’s spear kept finding gaps to my right, and somewhere in the middle I stopped being able to tell you how many I’d put down and started only counting how many were still standing near me.

Which is how I ended up leaning on my sword again, gasping, watching a dead man’s blood run off the blade in the rain.

I pulled the sword free and stood there a moment with the mist stinging the cuts on my knuckles, and I noticed, slowly, the way you notice a change in weather before you can say what changed —

The pressure against our line had thinned.

The roar from the Coalition side — that raw, ragged sound that had been constant since dawn — had a crack running through it now. And underneath it, filling the space that was opening up, came something steadier. Something with a rhythm to it. Imperial infantry, still in step, still grinding forward.

I let out a breath that shook more than I wanted it to, and grinned anyway, tired and a little disbelieving.

Logically, I thought, leaning harder on the sword as the worst of it rolled away from our flank, we might actually win this one.