to splinters and ripping into the men beside them.
‘Get up!’ Mallen urged her. He fired over the barricade and then dropped to reload, his hands moving swift and sure. She wasn’t sure that she could, just then. There was a ragged cut across one arm, and her questing fingers found a dent in the side of her helm that must have been from a piece of one of those bombs.
Grenades! she realized. But we never use them. She knew that they would never stay lit in the swamps. But, of course, we are not in the swamps.
Mallen was aiming again, but something was terribly wrong now because his line of fire put his target inside the barricade. She hauled herself to her feet to see a ring of grey uniforms pouring through a jagged rift in the defences, spreading into a tight semicircle and firing outwards, even as new men came in to help expand their stolen ground. She reached for her musket and fired it from the ground, seeing the man she was aiming at pitch backwards, and two more take his place. She levered herself up, crying, ‘Hold them in! Hold them in!’ or trying to. The words came out as a feeble croak. A soldier stepped between her and the Denlanders, aiming down the length of his gun, but was shot down before he could even fire. She lurched forward, snatched his musket and loosed it herself, but such sporadic resistance was not keeping the Denlanders in. Their semicircle was expanding outwards as more of them flocked through the breach to fire and reload, fire and reload, like machines.
‘Sabres! Sabres and clubs!’ she heard a high voice calling out, Marie Angelline at her best. ‘Close with them. Drive them out!’
Emily leant heavily against the barricade, feeling splinters jabbing through her jacket, making an effort of getting her sword from its scabbard. Somewhere down the line came a sustained explosion that was of no Denlander’s making, but was the sorcery of Giles Scavian washing over the Denlanders even as they hazarded another breach. She would have prayed for him, except resisting the advancing Denlanders now monopolized her prayers.
A handful of squads from Bear Sejant ran into the fire of the Denlanders and vaulted over their own casualties, swords and pikes and table legs upraised for the assault. The orderly formation of Denlanders disintegrated, men ducking out of the way of the onslaught, and yet others moving in to confront it. Suddenly there were men in grey running towards Emily, and she got her sabre clear with one final effort. She only hoped she had the strength to swing it.
The closest attacker went down before some anonymous Lascanne gunner. She lurched into the path of the next with a clumsy sweep of her blade that flashed past his face, bringing him up short in shock. He fumbled for a knife, and she slapped him across the face with the flat of her sword on the backswing, and managed to punch him in the head with the hand-guard. He reeled back, clutching at the wound, and she put all her strength into a thrust that took him in the stomach. His convulsing weight ripped the sword from her hands, but she grabbed his musket out of the air and fired it. Magic? It felt like any other gun she had ever held.
She reclaimed her sabre, messily, and another man was upon her in that instant, lashing out at her with his hatchet. He missed, and her parry went wild, and for a moment they traded blows with the air before she stepped in, trying to use the sabre’s leaden weight to split his head on a down stroke.
He caught her wrist with his free hand, and she fell against him, almost mouth to mouth. His wide, panicking eyes were all she could see, as he brought the axe clumsily down across the back of her helmet. Her world exploded in a shattering kaleidoscope of light and darkness and she fell to her knees, clutching her head, even as Mallen knifed her assailant, three stabs in and out, delivered faster than she could follow.
It had been the weighted back of the enemy’s hatchet, not the blade, or she would be dead, but she staggered as she got to her feet, her concentration fragmented. The entire battleground reeled and swam before her.
Time separated out into distinct slices, into distinct images. She lost the power to string them together into any coherent story.