The sentries died, quickly and with relative quiet. Men were forming up around him; others were coating the logs that ran along both sides of the causeway with oil and tallow brought along in leather sacks. More were handing up small wooden barrels from the boats.
“Ready, General,” Donnuld panted.
“Follow me.”
The Strikers followed. Behind them were Preblean archers; he’d picked them himself, from men with good sea-beast hornbows and plenty of experience. Forward . . . Yes. They really didn’t fortify their construction yard.
Siege engines reared about him in the dark, like monstrous beasts in a child’s nightmare. More sentries died, but a few survived long enough to sound an alarm. They’d have to work quickly.
Adrian and his men ran to the larger engines, the siege towers and heavy catapults. The kegs of gunpowder went underneath them, hastily buried. Esmond let his nose guide him to stacks of timber, mostly fresh-cut pine oozing sap.
“Right here, boys,” he called.
Covered firepots were brought out, torches lit and whipped into flame. Esmond thrust one under a stack of four-by-six timbers and shouted glee as the wood began to catch. Others of his men were kicking over barrels and pots of pitch and tar, throwing long coils of rope onto growing blazes; the archers were sending fire-arrows buzzing about, into piles of cordage and wood further in, into tents and heaps of sailcloth and fodder. Esmond was whirling another torch around his head when a lead-weighted dart whipped by his ear close enough for him to feel the draft, going thunk into a timber and whining with a malignant buzz like an enormous, very pissed-off bee.
“Fall in!” he called. Beside him the signaler sounded his horn, and the bannerman waved the flag. “Fall in! Everyone else back to the boats!”
The Strikers formed up at the head of the causeway—most of them, at least, and anyone too hopped up or too stupid to remember the signals he’d gone over at great length deserved what was going to happen to them. Happy arsonists ran by, climbing the wooden edges of the causeway and sliding down to the boats or into the water, whooping. The Confeds were reacting at last, though; he could see blocks of them working their way through the burning equipment, and the fires were making this area as bright as day.
“Discourage them,” he said to the Preblean in charge of the archers. The man nodded and turned to his own command: “Loose!”
The archers drew to the ear, thumbrings around the strings of their powerful composite bows. A cloud of yardlong shafts whickered out, vanishing from sight into the darkness and smoke above, then whipping back down into the gathering Confed ranks. A dozen men went down, silent or jerking or screaming and ripping at the barbed shafts in their flesh. More shrugged aside slight wounds, or started when armor or shields deflected the steel raining down out of the night.
“Keep it up,” Esmond said, teeth showing. “Pour it on!”
The Confed noncoms were hustling their sleepy men into battle order, shoving, bellowing orders. The formation began to shake itself out into the dreaded double line of the Confederation, shields up, darts rocking back ready on thick muscular peasant arms. Here and there a man fell as an arrow or slingstone went home, and the formation rippled as it closed up to maintain the precise one-yard gap between each soldier. In a minute, that living wall would begin to walk . . .
Except that in less than a minute . . .
BWAMMMP.
“Yes!” Esmond shouted.
Dirt, flame and splintered wood vomited up from beneath one of the siege towers. Shattered along one side it began to sway, leaned drunkenly, and then fell—four stories of heavy timber, crashing down across the back of the Confed formation.
About three hundred of them, Esmond thought. But—
BWAMMMP.
The other siege tower writhed as half a dozen ten-pound kegs of powder went off beneath it; this one disintegrated where it stood, showering the wavering Confed troops with heavy bone-cracking lumps and baulks of timber.
“Charge!” Esmond shouted.
The trumpeter sounded it, but the Strikers were already running forward, howling. A cloud of javelins surged out before them, and the archers fired over their heads. When they struck the Confeds, they struck in a solid line abreast, struck men whose formation had already been shaken. A rippling series of explosions shook their nerve even more, as catapults leapt into the air in fragments and rained down out of the dark.