The Ilytian gun crews had a lucky early hit. Or Kip hoped it was luck, as a tower top exploded a hundred paces away.
The Chromeria’s army—here mostly Kip’s people, selected because they were battle-hardened—immediately jumped to the labor of trying to salvage guns from the emplacement that had been blown to pieces, working in the gore and slime of a crew exploded by shell. The teams were all arranged for this, ready to determine what large guns could be salvaged, ready to wheel in and set up smaller cannons or use teams of oxen to lift cannons that had merely fallen when shell demolished tower foundations and the like.
Backup gun crews waited a safe distance from the front lines, jittery, wanting a chance to fight, but knowing that when their chance came, it would be because that spot they were to step into was a target whose range and position had already been found.
This was to be a marathon with no end until victory or nightfall or death.
Falling behind meant that the armada would make landfall, and the Blood Robes making landfall would be the beginning of the end.
But now, despite all the defenders’ work, it looked like it was about to begin anyway.
The withering fire had grown sporadic as supply lines were stretched, powder stores exhausted. Ships that should have been easy pickings instead sailed all the way to the mouth of the bay.
The enormous chains barring the armada’s entry to East Bay were attacked first. As the armada approached, caoránaigh swarmed out of the water where they’d been swimming unseen, cast luxin ladders up the great links, and climbed up like monkeys.
Kip had thought they’d be clumsy out of the water. Great.
A few of Kip’s best marksmen—joined in this by many of the Blackguards’ Archers—picked off dozens, but there were always more of them, and with their swimming abilities, even the charges dropping off into the sea was little more than a setback. Eventually, the wights packed charges against the links of the chain, swinging and swaying dangerously, and set fuses.
A few wights jumped back into the water too late and were killed by the explosions, but the great chain fell, having slowed the Blood Robes for only minutes.
Now there were only big guns to demolish the ships.
Kip sent a message that they should deploy sharpshooters and Archers on the other side of Big Jasper in case the wights did the same there, and then he gathered his army.
The orders and reports didn’t stop simply because the battle had been joined in earnest.
Through the fires and flames, the armada limped into the bay, the first ships smoking, half their oars broken, decks awash with blood. But they landed, and the galleons and coccas behind them pushed hard forward, even as wights and drafters disembarked to throw luxin planks down on the water itself, connecting ship to ship in one large floating mass so men could swarm from one to the other without slowing to use boarding nets.
A messenger said, “Sir, that problem with the sect of luxiats calling for drafters not to touch hellstone to drain their internal luxin has been put down.”
“Oh?” Kip asked, not really paying attention.
Kip could only watch the battle plan unfold below him. The people, military and civilian volunteers both, had been briefed on exactly what to do. No orders from the rear were even going to make it to them now.
Like all battle plans, it didn’t go as planned.
“Turns out High Luxiat Amazzal went down there himself, with a cane. He was beating men left and right as he reprimanded them. Quite impressive, I’m told.”
“Good, good,” Kip said.
Brave fools up and down the length of the seawall stayed at their gun emplacements rather than retreating, as if to erase their early paralysis by staying and firing until the bitter end.
There was no way to save them. Once the armada touched the seawall itself, wights and drafters tore through the stakes and spikes and fire traps and other passive defenses and mounted the top of the wall with frightening speed.
They poured down the length of the seawall like oil wicking up a lantern, dyeing it with their own colors and the red of blood as they massacred the gun crews one after another. One crew set off an explosion with the last of the black powder.
The smoke lasted longer than the obstacles did. The drafters lay great planks of luxin down on the flames and debris, and their men charged right over it.
Kip saw combined forces of drafters and nondrafting soldiers used in ways that he swore the White King must have learned from him.
But even as the Blood Robes were wicking toward the killing field waiting for them at that end of the docks, the rest of the armada had pushed deep into the bay itself. Some of the sailors made the same kind of last stand, but mostly their cannons had been arrayed in such a way that they didn’t have the angle to shoot in toward the city, and the men retreated as they were supposed to, if not quite in the good order one might hope. Some were trampled by their panicked fellows, or torn off the plentiful ladders at the walls so that some vicious ally could reach the top a heartbeat earlier.
They weren’t Kip’s men, and he hadn’t been here long enough to even start instilling discipline in these civilians, but it was still a helluva thing, watching men be killed by their friends.
And there was nothing to be done about it.
The big guns on the walls kept pounding the armada, which was all rafted together now. Ships that should have sunk were instead buoyed up by their fellows. It was probably a waste of powder, although it did help bait the trap.
As more of the armada pressed against land and the docks and the tethered ships that had been the Chromeria’s artillery, more and more men charged out, making a beachhead.
What struck Kip was that it was almost all men. Not drafters. Not wights.
The pagans had achieved an almost perfect inversion of the Chromeria’s values: in battle the Chromeria would save its people by spending those who had gone wight and the drafters closest to breaking the halo first, because those were closest to death or insanity. The Blood Robes were saving their wights and drafters by spending their people, because their people were farthest from magic and godhood.
All the White King’s promises of freedom and of a new order, a utopia where all would be made right, were belied.
For the Chromeria, the privileges of power were paired with prices. Drafters were expected to stand in the first line of defense, as the promachos did. Human nature being what it is, they didn’t always do so, but that was the deal, the expectation. By contrast, the nine kings would happily rule a wasteland, if they could rule.
Orholam damn them.
How many of these invaders about to die just wanted a better life, or hadn’t dared to stand against the White King when his armies had marched through their lands and had pressed them into his armies? They weren’t quite innocent, but they were men, not monsters. They deserved a second chance, and Kip couldn’t afford to offer them one. Not right now.
“Still not time to go?” Ben-hadad asked. He’d come back, as had others of the Mighty.
Kip looked around again, though he still didn’t know what he was looking for. “No.”
They’d pushed in far enough. Thousands of men were clambering over the moored ships and onto the docks, between the boathouses and warehouses.
“Raise the red,” Kip commanded.
The men had been waiting for it. They raised a red flag, and immediately, the cannons atop the walls began firing incendiary shot at the Chromeria’s abandoned ships and docks still moored within the bay. Pyrejelly had been drafted into barrels and hidden away yesterday. The last order for all the sailors abandoning their ships was to open those barrels and splatter it about.