Catrin knew better than anyone how to give heart to those around her, and she made a great show of it now. “How then, hearts of Calder?” she said. She didn’t cry it loud, but her voice carried. “Are we ready to take this fight to them that wished it, and give them more than they wished for?”
We didn’t cheer, not wanting to bring the enemy soldiers on the other side of the fence to their crisis too soon, but we threw our clenched fists in the air in salute. Then as Catrin switched to Franker signs, we took our places.
We had agreed that I would ride alone inside Challenger – alone except for Elaine, who would be driving us. Our show of strength and defiance needed to be seen, and the more of us that were outside, the better it would be. Catrin, Fer and Jemiu took their places on the wagon’s flanks. Standing so high off the ground they would be easy targets, but everyone in our party would see their Ramparts there and be encouraged. Morrez Ten-Taken and Gendel Stepjack would be there too, carrying the rifle and the scatter-gun.
I had talked long with Morrez about this, and Catrin had talked with him too. Was he ready to go against his own, we wanted to know, and could we trust him to know who was his friends in this fight?
“I’m not like to forget,” he told us.
“Still,” Catrin said. “I think it might go hard with you. Seeing them grey uniforms you used to wear. Remembering what you was before…”
“I said I won’t forget, Rampart. Nor it won’t be hard at all. Getchen’s got our baby inside her. What home I got is here now. I won’t see it broke and burned.”
So Morrez got to carry the rifle, being the best at using it by a great long way. He took up a place inside the turret, with his feet on the ladder that went down inside and his back braced against the turret’s side. He could see in all directions from there, and take aim at enemies a long way off. And Gendel got the heavy burden of being next to him. If Morrez wavered in his loyalty, Gendel was to shoot him with a scatter gun, and probably Morrez knew that as well as anyone did.
We were thirty paces from the fence. Right at our backs stood Rampart Knife drawn up in the shape of an arrowhead. They would break to both sides when we moved, taking their pace from Jon in the middle. The rest of our fighters were ranged behind them in a column that was three deep. Those at the edges had spears, protecting the archers in the middle.
And that was what we had by way of a plan. Well, that and six silver bottles full of Hell’s fires and hurtful force.
Waiting on Catrin’s signal, I watched the outside of the fence in Challenger’s magic mirror. There was a deal of red dots out there, which meant a deal of fighters armed with tech, but the white dot that was Berrobis was a good way off. This was our moment, but I couldn’t do anything to hurry it. Once we started, we couldn’t stop until we were done. We would be like an arrow loosed out of a bow, that can only go where it’s sent. Halfway was nowhere. There would be no choosing.
“Ready,” Catrin called down at last into Challenger’s turret.
She didn’t ask me to give her the count. It would not be needful. The explosion would put everyone on their mark, and we would count from that.
“Challenger,” I said.
“Yes, Sergeant Tanhide.”
“Trigger.”
The first shell, set to its zero mark, detonated at once. The fence in front of us was swallowed in a great ball of light and fire. Smoke came afterwards, spewing out from the flames as they died and swallowing them up. The noise was last – a grinding roar that made your body ring like a plucked string even as it deafened your ears.
“Forward,” I said.
And forward Challenger went, with splintered fenceposts falling round him like rain, through the gap that had opened and into the half-outside. Everyone else stayed put. Their time was not yet.
I don’t know what the others was seeing. The smoke was very thick, hiding everything in front of us. I had set the magic mirror in what Challenger called split-screen mode. The upper half showed me what was in front of us, and it was nothing but roiling grey and black. The lower half was the readings from our mast on the roof of Rampart Hold. That showed me the red dots rushing in at once towards us, aiming to shut us in.
We kept on going forward for a few seconds longer before Elaine swung Challenger hard to the left and followed the line of the fence. It was meant to look as if we had hoped to break out but then had lost our courage as the Half-Ax fighters advanced on us.
Twenty paces, thirty, forty. Then we stopped dead, with a wall of grey uniforms running straight at us, and went back the way we had come without even turning. All was moil and noise around us, and nothing was clear. The smoke from the burst shell hung heavy over everything, just as we had hoped it would. We needed that cloak, that confusion.
I was counting out the seconds in my head as we roared back along our own path. I saw a flare of bright orange as Catrin used the firethrower, and heard the spitting crack of the rifle. The rifle boomed ever and again, felling this one and that one, but Jemiu and Fer were not fighting at all. Their time would come later. For now, they were unhitching the leather slings and rolling the heavy shells one by one over the side of the wagon to thud down into the long grass in our wake.
In the magic mirror, red dots were all round us now. Arrows flew over us, and some clattered on our sides. None found their marks though. We were moving fast and we were hard to see, travelling backwards as we were into the very thickest heart of the cloud we had raised.
Elaine turned us in our tracks, our back end crashing against the fence, and took us off in a new direction. The Half-Ax fighters were closing on us from behind now and running to block our way in front. More were keeping pace with us to the right, on the far side of the stake-blind. None of them had ever seen Challenger before – or at least, not since he waked for me at Calder ford – but they knew a weapon when they saw one and they had no intention of letting it run loose along their line.
I was slow on the count, but Challenger could not be mistaken in such things. When we reached the agreed-on mark, the zero, we were in the one safe place in a field we had sown with shells. Also, we were back where we had started, in front of the gaping hole we’d blown in our own fence and level with the rest of our waiting tally. We rolled to a stop again.
There was a moment when it seemed nothing in the world was moving at all, and all sounds were hushed. I marvelled at it – that stillness could be found in the midst of such ruck and turmoil. My mind, that had been stunned and dazed by the wild movement and terrible noise, floated in its own secret place and waited for time to start up again.
“Zero,” Challenger said.
The world caught fire.
This burst was much louder and more terrible than the first. Words won’t compass it, so I’ll just say that and leave it lie. The first shell, that had blown a hole in the fence and let us out, had been set at zero to start with and so it went off as soon as Challenger sent the signal to its fuze. The other five, that we had sown all across the half-outside like seeds, had their fuzes set at one minute. They had been counting down ever since. Now that count was at an end.
For a hundred strides all round us, the solid ground was ripped up and flung into the sky. The Half-Ax soldiers that had been standing or running on that ground met a like fate. Five shells going off at once made the earth heave as if it had been struck a mortal blow. Even inside Challenger, I flinched from that terrible force and almost fell sprawling out of my chair. Catrin and the others, up on the wagon’s flanks, ducked down as the air filled with sods of earth, shattered stakes, shards of rock.