A tremendous roar went up from the Grik, a predatory roar of triumph as the shield wall broke yet again. This time, it was as if some critical point had been reached beyond all endurance. One moment, a few Grik were racing through a small gap, hacking and slashing as they came, and in the next, like a pane of glass in a hailstorm, the entire wall around the gap shattered and fell away. Lieutenant Shinya raced by, aiming for the breakthrough, but Matt caught his arm. The Japanese officer whirled toward him, an insane light in his eyes that dimmed just slightly when he recognized the captain.
«Save the guns, if you can,» Matt croaked. «Try to form a square around them. If we can make it to the breastworks, we might be able to hold them there.» Shinya nodded reluctantly, deterred from his suicidal charge. He ran off shouting for runners. They both knew it was hopeless. Too many had already started to run. But it was all they had left and they had to try.
Maybe not hopeless after all, Matt amended as he wiped his eyes and struggled to see through the developing chaos. The Second Marines and most of the First Guards had already formed a square of sorts. It was a maneuver the Marines practiced often and the Guards had simply retreated into the formation with the Marines. They’d managed to save at least a couple of guns too — suddenly a pair of bronze snouts pushed through and barked spitefully at the Grik that had begun to curve around and try to get between the square and the barricade. Scores fell beneath the billowing smoke and the banshee wail of canister. To the right, the line still miraculously held. But its severed end had curled back toward the wall to form a semicircle at its base.
Separate from either force, however, Matt, Gray, and Keje stood alone as the shield wall in front of them melted away, oblivious to anything but the need to escape. Behind them raged the thundering horde. Matt gauged the distance to the Marine square. Many within it were shouting his name, or Keje’s, and waving, urging them toward it. There was no way.
A lone Lemurian gunner, abandoned with her dead crew, stood waiting while the Grik swept down upon her. Crouching behind the axle as bolts whizzed by or spanged off the barrel of her gun, she looked small and frail compared to the monsters coming for her. There was no doubting the determination of her stance, however, and her tail flicked back and forth as if she was preparing to pounce. At the last moment, she touched the linstock to the vent and the gun blew itself apart with a tremendous blast. Grik bodies were hurled into the air or mowed down by fragments of the tube or pieces of the carriage. She must have loaded it to the muzzle, Matt thought, stricken by the act. Of the lone Lemurian gunner, nothing remained.
«Come, my friends!» Keje bellowed, pointing at the Marine square. «We must try!» With a final glance through the smoke at the momentarily stunned Grik advance, Matt and Gray joined Keje, racing toward the square as it resumed a slow, shuffling retreat.
Gray uttered a sudden, startled grunt of surprise and fell to the ground as if he’d tripped. Matt and Keje both stopped and turned toward him. He was lying on his side with a black vaned crossbow bolt protruding from his hip. Irritably, he waved them on. Keje disemboweled a Grik warrior with his scota as it ran toward them out of the lingering cloud and Matt took careful aim and shot another with his pistol. More were coming. Soon it would be a flood. «Go on, damn it! I’ll be along!» Gray yelled.
«Shut up,» Matt grated as he and Keje helped him to his feet. Stifling a tooward the square. Matt shot another Grik and then another as they struggled closer to the Marines, whose formation had started to expand toward them as it moved, hoping to take them into its embrace. Keje deflected a blow from a Grik sword with his small shield and Matt shot the creature as it snapped at Gray with its terrible jaws. His pistol slide locked back. Empty. He tucked the gun into his belt and parried a spear thrust with his sword. He wasn’t much of a swordsman, but holding the Chief and fighting with his left hand, he was almost helpless. He managed to deflect the spear just enough that instead of driving through his chest, the sharp blade rasped along his ribs. He gasped with pain but clamped down with his arm so the Grik couldn’t pull the spear back for another thrust and Gray drove the point of his cutlass into its eye. It shrieked and fell back, but then Keje went down, pulling them down on top of him.
Matt rolled onto his stomach to rise. All around him he saw running feet, Grik feet with long curved claws that slashed at the earth as they ran. He felt a searing blow of agony in his left shoulder blade that drove him to the ground, out of breath. He raised his head once more. There, just ahead, was the Marine square. He could see the tired, bloody faces of the people he had brought to this, staring expressionlessly back at him, but with their eyes blinking in frustration. He could feel Chief Gray, trapped beneath him and struggling to rise, and he tried to roll aside. Got to let him up, he thought. Then something struck him on the side of the head, and bright sparks swirled behind his eyes, quickly scattering into darkness.
«Through! Charge through! Do not stop at the barricade!» bellowed Lord Rolak, waving his sword above his head. He was nearly spent and his old legs ached from unaccustomed exertion. He stopped, gasping for a moment as his warriors flowed past, shouldering their way through the debris of a shocked and splintered army. He stared at the survivors of the sea folk as they stumbled, slack-jawed and empty-eyed toward the dock as if they knew, instinctively, safety for them could only be found at sea. He couldn’t believe it. They’d broken, yes, but they had fought against impossible odds for longer than he’d ever expected, and his shame warred with his pride for their accomplishment. Never again could it be said with honesty that sea folk would not fight.
Some fought still. A solid block of sea folk warriors with several flags held high in their midst was churning its way through a mass of enemies back toward the relative safety of the barricade. The block was dwindling even as he watched, but the path they hewed through the foe was out of all proportion to their losses. His sense of failure and shame was only slightly assuaged by the fact that he wasn’t entirely too late. It had taken his and the Orphan Queen’s forces almost two hours to work their way through the streets of Aryaal, streets that became ever more congested as they neared the north gate. The fighting had caused a general exodus of townsfolk to gather there seeking refuge from the firebombs and hoping that if the city fell they might yet escape to B’mbaado. It was an empty hope, of course, but it was the only hope they had. Then, when they finally forced their way to the gate itself, they found it closed and fortified from the inside as well as out. The king, or his brat, must have foreseen something like what Rolak was attempting and ordered his personal guard to prevent anyone from trying to leave. It was then that Rolak’s defiance of his king had sparked a civil war in the city of Aryaal.
He stormed the gate with Queen Maraan at his side. The fight for the towers that housed the gate windlasses was difficult and costly — he himself had overseen their construction years before with that very purposked their way to the machinery that opened the massive doors, leaving scores of white-clad bodies behind them. When the gate swung wide, Queen Maraan’s Six Hundred and a slightly larger number of Aryaalan warriors — rebels now — swarmed down into the waterfront shantytown where fisherfolk and boat people dwelt. Through the squalid alleys filled with muck they raced, until finally they emerged behind the breastworks to see the disaster their king’s treachery had wrought. Tears of guilt and humiliation stung Rolak’s eyes as he beheld, at last, the extent of Aryaal’s dishonor. The fact that any of those they had betrayed still lived — let alone fought — was proof that if only they’d followed the plan, a great victory could have been achieved. Now all that remained was to save what he could of this valiant army as well as his own people’s soul.