Chapter 440 — This Is a War

Once the warhorse beneath him and the knights guarding his flanks began little by little to pick up speed, Sir Marchi seemed at last to recover the feel of the "battlefield" he knew.

The hoofbeats gradually fell into a dense and orderly rhythm; the wind tore at their visors with a growing roar; and within that din the knights held their silence, silent as they launched their charge. The warding aura of transcendent knights began to seep outward, knitting itself into a single whole that wrapped about this company of several dozen low-, mid-, and one high-ranked knight, blurring every figure within it into a hazy shape. A formless cyclone caught up the magic in the air and spun it into a swift, forward-hurling vortex; outside the vortex the guns thundered without pause, and those two dread, majestic beams still cut and bored relentlessly through the walls of Boulder Fortress; yet the knights inside the vortex seemed to have set all of it aside. For men already committed to the charge, there was only one thing ahead.

Yes. This was the battlefield Sir Marchi knew. This was the "war" he knew.

Only there were still ways in which this place differed from the battlefields he knew: he no longer faced another knightly order driving forward without a thought for anything else, nor a line of heavy infantry and militia spearmen. In fact, there was nothing at all before him —

the nearest enemy lay beyond charging distance.

Within his field of view there was only open battlefield, and the "Skyfire" shrieking across the sky above it.

It left him somewhat unsettled; he was not used to a fight in which he could not close with the enemy. Fortunately there was still a target in sight — the two strange warships resting on the surface of the Whitewater River, the banners of the Cecil family snapping above them, that mark of sword and plough standing for the most honored and most ancient power in this kingdom. Today, it was the enemy.

One had to call it irony, and a sorrowful thing; and yet for a knight, the chance to challenge an enemy of such stature was a distinction all its own.

The company's speed climbed gradually to its limit; once the charging formation was set, even low-ranked knights were carried along at greatly increased speed, and the whole body of horsemen, once in full career, burst out with a destructive force beyond imagining. Nothing in this world could check it save a knightly order of equal size, equal strength, and equal speed — or the heavy infantry of the royal guard in that dwarven kingdom at the far western edge of the continent. Sir Marchi saw the earth to either side of the company curling and splitting apart under the tearing of the magic vortex; sparks of energy great and small began to leap in the air; the magic around the knights was shaping itself into an arrowhead — and it filled him with a confidence such as he had never known.

What did the Cecil men have that could stop an arrowhead like this?

What they had was a volley from more than a hundred "Persuader-I" railguns.

The uncanny shrieking came down from high above when the company was midway through its charge, startling Sir Marchi out of that strange elation of the battlefield. He raised his head a little and saw trail after trail of pale blue magic-fire slicing through the air and falling toward the earth, and where they fell was the road the knights must ride.

In almost the same instant he understood that the Cecil officer commanding the "Skyfire" must be a knight himself — and unquestionably a proper one.

These blows from the heavens had caught, almost perfectly, the moment in a charge when a knightly order could perform no evasive movement, and the lead was calculated to a hair.

"Do not stop!" the knight shouted, his voice shaking the magic field that enclosed the formation and carrying clear to every knight's ear. "Shields up!"

The knights raised their warding shields and at once invoked the knightly art of "Armor of Glory." A metallic sheen surfaced upon their plate, and the same film of protection floated up around the outside of the magic vortex that wrapped the whole charging array.

The sky had turned overcast at some point; under that leaden light the company galloped across the open field, the "Calibrator beam" lit the heavens above the battlefield, and a hundred-odd pale blue streaks of shellfire came down like a meteor shower, bursting upon their ranks.

The elite knightly order of Boulder Fortress was not the same thing as that rabble Count Horsman had summoned up.

They were the finest force in the realm after the Eastern Legion.

Nor were they the same as those knights on Gravel Ridge — careless, unguarded, scattered about.

The combined battle-array they formed was solid as a city wall.

But a wall — even a wall in full charge — is, in the end, a thing of the last age.

Deafening explosions came from every direction; the terrible "Skyfire" tore at the magic vortex around the knights. Sir Marchi saw the earth burst apart on all sides, vast quantities of stone and soil flung up, and the rising dust filled with flickers of arcane energy. The perfect vortex was ripped open; a number of the low-ranked knights at the rear of the column vanished in the towering detonation almost before they could react at all.

Now, at last, Sir Marchi knew how much force those "Skyfire" strikes hurled against Boulder Fortress's magic barrier.

The magic barrier must not be allowed to fall! Once the walls of Boulder Fortress stood directly exposed to such weapons, they could never hold out until the barrier came back up.

Thinking so, he could not help quickening his pace, and the knights who had followed him for years began at once to accelerate with him — though their heads rang from the blast, men raised under harsh discipline since childhood, tempered in the most perilous corners of the kingdom before being posted to Boulder Fortress, could still hold on in conditions like these.

The second attack came swiftly, and this time it was more accurate than the last, and more deadly.

It came from the second height the Cecil men had raised.

No wonder they had built a second height... It was never for drawing water. Its purpose was to cover the warships on the Whitewater River —

Beneath his visor, Sir Marchi's face was like still water.

Efficient command, iron discipline, individual quality that crushed ordinary noble levies outright, and then the tactics of covering an advance with long-range weapons, the infiltration of Boulder Fortress, spies, intelligence, assassination, sabotage...

This was how the Cecil men fought — or rather, this was how that "Gaoyang Cecil" fought.

By comparison, the "cleverest" stratagem he had heard in the military hall of Boulder Fortress was nothing more than poisoning the Whitewater River...

A thought flashed suddenly through Sir Marchi's mind: Boulder Fortress had perhaps fallen long ago — fallen the moment those southerners entered its gates.

He was merely preserving, now, the last shred of dignity owed to his family's name.

On Height Two, Philip stood watching from afar the vortex of magic coiling up over the plain.

It had thinned and dimmed by at least half, yet it still held its basic charging posture; to a "country knight" of rural birth, that vortex stood for something very near the "chivalric spirit" that existed only in books.

And yet he had no choice but to keep ordering the guns to fire, to smash that vortex apart bit by bit — for no order to cease fire had come down, and the two Calibrator rainbow-light cannons on the Whitewater River still required the support of Height Two.

He estimated the column's charging speed, worked out the rough lead and the firing angle required, and then gave the order for the third bombardment.

The vortex of magic went out at last, but here and there a few scattered points of light still moved forward through the smoke and dust — the glow of warding auras not yet extinguished.