he just stood there, knees bent and hunched forward for balance in the shifting mud. Then he seemed to come to a decision within himself, and his hands exploded with smoke and fire as the pistols discharged in unison, directly into the backs of the Denlanders.
The weapons fell from his hands instantly and he reached for the next pair. His mouth was open and he was yelling something – probably something obscene. The Denlanders were turning even as he fired again, and they must have believed an entire squad of Lascanne soldiers had come up behind them.
And then Angelline bellowed, ‘Charge!’ in a voice like thunder, and her surviving soldiers boiled out of cover with their muskets firing, with their knives and sabres bared.
Brocky stood still and fired his third set of pistols. His face was a study in panic, a man who has opened a door onto something he had never wanted to see. At a range of no more than five feet, he had not missed a shot.
Angelline and Emily, leading the charge, met the Denlanders head on. Emily’s sabre flashed and missed, but the Denlanders were falling back. She saw a man try to bring his musket to bear on Brocky, far too close for such elegant shooting. Brocky’s final pistols flashed, one firing, one not. The Denlander was punched from his feet, falling backwards over the bodies of his comrades.
And there was quiet for just a little while, as some twenty-three natives of Lascanne crouched amongst twice that many corpses of both nationalities.
‘Brocky,’ Emily challenged him, ‘you were faking! You pretended you’d been shot to fool them.’
He turned world-weary eyes on her. ‘Oh, I wish,’ he replied. He used one pistol butt to hook aside his jacket, and she saw a small patch of red across his shirt that in any other circumstances she would have taken for wine.
‘Does it hurt?’
‘There’s a stupid question.’
‘Sergeant, there are more of them out there,’ Caxton reported to her urgently. ‘Must be at least two more squads, judging from all the movement. What the hell are we going to do?’
‘The colonel must be told,’ Angelline stated flatly. ‘He must know that they’re back.’
‘Can you manage, Brocky?’ Emily asked him.
‘Going to have to.’ From inside his jacket he had pulled a metal flask, and was now opening it with his teeth. With a hiss of pain, he half-emptied it over the wound, pouring the rest down his throat.
‘Can you walk?’
‘Going to have to.’ He sat down beside her heavily. ‘Did I do all right?’
‘It was perhaps the most stupid thing I’ve yet seen someone do out here, if that’s what you mean,’ she said.
‘I had no idea what I was supposed to do. I felt like the world had written me off for dead, but forgotten to actually do it . . . Then they stepped over me, and I had this . . . mad idea.’
‘We all saw your mad idea,’ Angelline put in from behind him. ‘Sergeant, I want to split the squads. We’ll make our separate ways back to camp. It gives us a better chance of someone getting word back.’
Brocky had gone very quiet, and he set to reloading his last two pistols with great industry. Emily glanced around at the soldiers still with them. ‘Caxton, how many of our lot made it?’
‘Twenty-two, counting you and me,’ the ensign supplied. ‘Also twenty-nine of the Bears.’
‘Right.’ Fifty-one soldiers in a swampland crawling with Denlanders. Emily knew what Angelline was hoping for. One group, either group, would catch the notice of the enemy, and in the confusion the other might slip by. Might, for it was a risky business, but they were fast running short of options.
She glanced at Brocky, still reloading, and then back at the master sergeant. She felt she owed the man this, after his rising from the dead and saving the day. ‘Master Sergeant, you have more men. Will you escort Mr Brocky?’
‘Of course.’ There was a fair amount of knowledge in Angelline’s smile. ‘I’d be glad to.’ She put out a hand. ‘Good luck to you, Marshwic. Good luck to all of us.’
Her clasp was firm and brisk, the handshake of someone agreeing on some minutiae of business, not to a life-or-death gamble. Emily returned her grip as best she could.
Then she and Caxton got the Stag Rampant soldiers together, and moved them off cautiously into the mist, waiting for the next musket shot to find them.