“Wodep’s thunderbolts!” a Confed trooper bawled, and threw down his shield.
The noncom behind him killed the man before he’d taken his second panic-stricken step, but then the Emeralds were upon them. Esmond threw at point-blank range, and the javelin crunched through the Confed’s face to knock his helmet off as the point met the inside rear with an audible clank. He punched his buckler into another face, stabbed a throat, brought the buckler around to break the wrist that held an assegai and then stab downward into a thigh. The Confeds shattered the way a clay winejug might when dropped on solid stone . . . and spattered red in the same way, too.
“Rally!” Esmond shouted, and the trumpeter blew it again and again. Some of the men were reluctant; one or two were so victory-drunk that they careened off into the darkness. “Rally!”
“Fall back to the boats,” he went on.
“Feels good to see their backs, by Wodep,” Donnuld said, as they jogged back.
Behind them the Confed siege works and timber stores were fully involved, a cone of bright orange flame rising into the spark-shot night and underlighting its own black cloud of smoke. Glorious, glorious destruction, Esmond thought, feeling the savage heat of it on his face.
They reached the edge of the causeway, slid down into the boats. Esmond took a torch and tossed it at the oil-soaked wood as they left; flames ran across the timbers in a sheet of orange-red, adding to the hellish symphony of flames.
“It won’t be as easy the next time,” he said, chuckling. “But I think we’ll come up with some way to annoy them.”
He started as Adrian nodded beside him. “We haven’t shown them most of our surprises yet,” he said. “Technological surprise.”
“What’s technology?” Esmond asked, curious.
“That’s what the Confeds are about to find out, brother.”
* * *
“What am I going to do with you?” Demansk asked his daughter.
She lounged back in the camp chair and sipped from her clay cup. “Velipad piss . . . well, you’re not going to marry me off, not after all this.”
Demansk flushed and hit the table with a fist, making the jug bounce. “You don’t speak to your father like that, missy!” he growled, his voice filling the tent like a direbeast’s warning. “And a tent is not a place to discuss family matters at this volume.”
They were both speaking Emerald, but so could any Confed citizen with any pretensions to education. The ranker guards outside probably couldn’t, and there probably wasn’t anyone else within earshot . . . probably.
“Sorry, Father,” Helga said, dropping her eyes. “I’m just trying to put the best possible face on it.”
Demansk sighed and rubbed a hand over the gray-and-brown stubble on his chin. Small insects were coming through the laced opening of his tent and immolating themselves in the oil lamps with small spppt sounds and a disagreeable smell; the scent triggered old memories of camps, running back to his earliest manhood. Helga had been conceived in a tent like this, to his second wife; she’d accompanied him on several campaigns down around the southern border, when he’d been one of the senior officers overseeing the building of the wall against the barbarians.
“Your mother was a lot like you,” he said heavily. “Perhaps if she’d lived . . . maybe that’s why I’ve indulged you so. Too much, probably.”
He sighed again; with commendable self-command, Helga held her piece. “Oh, we could patch up some sort of match. . . .”
“You’d have to pay heavily, and I wouldn’t be getting any prize, Father. I’d rather be a spinster. It isn’t as if you don’t have grandchildren already, and besides . . .”
“Besides, there’s this pirate,” Demansk said dryly.
“He’s not a pirate!”
“Mercenary, then,” Demansk said, with a slight wry smile. “Emerald rebel, surely.”
“Redvers was the rebel, and he was Adrian Gellert’s patron,” Helga said reasonably. “A client has to follow his patron, doesn’t he?”
“Well, that’s the tradition.” Demansk gestured at the wine jug, and Helga poured for them both again, adding dippers of water from the bigger clay vase by the door. “I think sometimes it would be better for the State if it wasn’t.”