* * *
“Here come the even-more-barbarous barbarians,” Esmond said, his voice full of confidence. “God of the Shades, accept our sacrifice—even if it does have fleas.”
Adrian didn’t join the chuckle that ran through those of the Emeralds who could hear his brother; it rippled down the loose formation as men repeated it to their neighbors. His own mouth was dry as he watched the line of bright points boiling out of the dust . . .
Intimidating, isn’t it? Raj’s voice whispered. A vison ran through his mind: another battlefield, and thousands of men riding the giant dogs he’d seen before. Men in steel helmets and breastplates, big bearded yellow-haired men with fifteen-foot lances, some of them with great wings sweeping up from the backplates of their armor. The howling of men and mounts and the earth-shaking thunder of paws filled his mind.
Ahead—ahead and to the right of Raj’s viewpoint—men in blue uniforms and bowl helmets bent over the curious chariotlike device Raj called a cannon.
“Juicy target,” one of them said, grinning and spitting through brown irregular teeth. He stood aside and gripped a cord that ran to the rear of the cannon. “Nine hundred meters, shrapnel shell . . . fire!”
Adrian blinked and nodded, smiling internally. A few of his slingers gave him odd looks, but it was only to be expected that a man who made miracles would be . . . odd, occasionally.
“Fuses ready!” The fuse men whirled the rods that held the slowmatch, and trails of bitter blue smoke cut through the air. “Light!”
Each touched the slowmatch to the fuse of a grenade, and the cords sputtered into life. There was a gingerly care to the gestures that put the round brown pottery shapes into the pockets of the slings; the fuses were supposed to be seven-second, but they weren’t entirely reliable yet.
“Targets—”
The slingers raised their staff-slings, eyes picking out spots in the onrushing formations. The snarling fangs of the velipads were clearly visible now, and the shouting contorted faces behind the bar visors of the helmets.
“Loose!”
The slings had yard-long wooden handles, and the silk cords at their ends were as long again. Each man swept staff and cords around in a full circle that put the strength of their shoulders and torso into the cast, not simply their arms. The one-pound bomblets didn’t have the blurring speed a lead shot did; those almond-shaped bits of metal could punch through a shield and kill the man behind it through a cuirass. The grenades did snap out quickly enough to make men look up and raise their shields.
Crack. Crack. Crackcrackcrackcrack—
Vicious red snapping sparks, faint in the midday sun, visible only against the puffs of dirty gray-black smoke. The velipads reared and whistle-screamed at the noise and the unfamiliar sulfur stink. What couldn’t be seen or heard were the fragments of hard ceramic and lead shot that smashed out too fast for the eye to catch, and the shockwaves of the grenades. Then men and beasts screamed as fragments gouged into flesh. The order of the charge disappeared into sudden chaos. An armored man and heavy war-velipad weighed over a ton; at a full gallop they couldn’t turn swiftly, or overleap the writhing heap of mangled flesh that suddenly appeared at the footclaws of the mount. The riders’ efforts to turn their beasts simply added to the chaos as clawed feet skidded out from under the torquing weight that hindered them. Worse, the lancers further back in the formation could see nothing within the dust cloud ahead of them, and spurred their velipads forward.
And the second volley of grenades burst over the heads of the milling, thrashing mass. More velipads went down, to add to the bone-breaking weights rolling and kicking in the tangled barrier of flesh. Another volley, and another . . .
“They’re running, by the Maiden!” Esmond shouted.
“That they are,” Adrian replied, grinning, slapping him on his corseleted shoulder. He carefully avoided looking at the killing ground before him.
* * *
“D . . . ddd . . . demonic thunder !” the courier stuttered, his face the color of the whey that dripped from the pans when the dairywoman squeezed the curds to make cheese.