Kip’s commanders were screaming, even firing their muskets in the air to try to draw their men’s eyes to them, lest they break.
Then an explosion rocked the field, and one of the charging idiots simply disappeared in fire as if he’d stood on the barrel of a musket aimed at the heavens. An instant later, another hit another of the buried charges and was flung skyward. Only half of him landed.
Not even the war dogs had smelled the charges; the Cwn y Wawr’s dogs were bred to fight, and while they could smell more acutely than any man by far, their abilities were wan compared to those of the two scent hounds the will-casters had brought.
It was two hounds who would save Kip’s entire army.
The charges had been buried weeks before, the smell of their luxin covered so well that they had been noticed only when the hounds’ human partners reported that a certain area of ground had no scent of human passage at all. That had led their commanders—Kip hadn’t even known about it until the deed was done—to scour the ground three nights in a row, dodging patrols and (unknowing at the time) the buried charges in order to discern the trap.
Kip watched the twenty men die with cold command. He had no pity for men who were willing to trade their friends’ deaths and their commanders’ plans for their own glory. He watched them die in blood and fire, men screaming with blown-off feet and partial faces. Mostly he noted which charges had been exploded. He had a partial map of them, not a full one, so it was probably wasted effort, but you never knew.
One fool panicked as he saw his compatriots die. He turned and tried to run back in his own footprints. Another improbably made it through the mines and within twenty paces of the enemy lines. Somehow every shot in the first volley of at least twenty muskets had missed the man.
But two miracles was as many as a man could ask in one minute. The next volley, guns and magic both, leveled the man as he came within ten paces.
It had happened soon enough that none of their friends followed them. Thank Orholam.
The killing ground in the middle of the battlefield was limited, and the Blood Robes naturally knew exactly how far it extended. It had been their trap, hoping Kip would race into the minefield as he tried to break their lines.
Kamal’s Blood Robes stopped their advance in the middle so as not to trample on their own charges, but their broad flanks extended around each side. Those continued their enveloping tactics.
Kip’s drafters didn’t waste any time. Those at the center of his line, knowing they were against a minefield and not soldiers, hadn’t been carrying many weapons. Instead they’d been lugging slabs of luxin in pairs, green over yellow, three feet wide and five feet tall. Another crazy invention Ben-hadad’s corps of engineers had come up with, a portable wall. Under musket fire, the men now stabbed the sections of the portable wall into the soil in rapid succession, from left to right, each section fitting perfectly into the next.
Meanwhile Kip’s reds threw out long streams of pyrejelly, which a moment later sub-reds set fire to. The killing field was now visibly delineated for Kip’s men: ‘Don’t go in here.’
But now the Nightbringers’ flanks, which had stopped, too, faced enemy lines deeper than their own, and far wider.
They collapsed before they even came in contact with the Blood Robes.
As the Blood Robe cavalry advanced, completing its flanking maneuver, the Nightbringers’ torch-carrying camp followers were revealed to be civilians, betrayed by the swelling light of the rising sun as the cavalry came nearer.
The men and women fled toward the forest, many dropping their torches.
There was now nothing between Kip’s camp in the woods and the Blood Robe cavalry except fleeing civilians. The sight of those fleeing did to the cavalry what fleeing prey does to any predator. Hundreds surged forward, eager for killing and plunder. Their commanders didn’t even try to stop them.
“Hold!” Kip shouted. That was the signal. With the sun nearing dawn, he’d caught sight of a broad form pulling itself out of the river behind the Blood Robes.
Tallach tossed his head and Kip sawed at the reins they’d tied to his jaws. The reins were purely for show. Kip never used reins. The immediacy of command would have actually been nice, but the bear wouldn’t stand for it.
Kip shot superviolet signals out, and his men started screaming, collapsing back farther. The infantry lines were closing in on the sides, and Tallach seemed unnerved by the charging men.
“Hold, Tallach! Hold!” Kip shouted.
And the bear bolted.
Kip dropped his sword and Cruxer his spear, and they simply held on. Tallach bounded away from his army, fleeing into the forest.
He heard a cheer from the Blood Robes as they saw Kip’s army lose its commander.
In between surprisingly fluid bounds, Kip saw his gambit unfolding in the forest.
They’d put the fleetest of foot at the front of the line—making the young men and women the last people to get to flee from the cavalry. They’d also armed them with grenadoes. The civilians had followed orders better than the hotheads in Kip’s lines, and had run all the way to the cover of the forest before turning and throwing the grenadoes.
Some ran too slow, though, and were run down. Some panicked and didn’t stop at all, forgetting their weapons and their orders, but Kip had figured that would happen. He’d armed them with grenadoes mostly to bolster the courage of those who were the bait for the trap.
Nonetheless, Kip saw a number of them turn and hurl the hand-size bombs at their pursuers. One hit a tree not two paces away from herself, and she was shredded by shrapnel. Another hit a horse and blew off its leg. Its careening body planted its rider headfirst into another tree, crunching him down to half his original height. Others missed and turned to run again.
Not far into the woods, which were significantly darker in the dawning light than the treeless floodplain, the night mares sprang their trap. First came the smoke. Charges went off with dull thuds, disorienting the charging cavalry and blocking the view of what was happening to them from their army. Wolves and panthers and mountain lions pounced from rocks and tree limbs and hidden hollows.
The civilians had their own traps, deeper, in case any of the cavalry got that far.
But Kip saw none of those. Tallach’s path cut back into the forest, and then along its front edge, hopefully just out of sight of the Blood Robes on the plain.
One straggler from the cavalry was slow enough to be in their path, and Tallach elongated his bounds and slashed one huge paw as they went behind the horse. His blade-lined claws caught only the head and shoulders of the rider. Conn Arthur hated killing horses.
The horse staggered for one step, and then stood. The rider slumped and tumbled out of the saddle, his head and one arm torn completely off. Tallach had barely even broken stride.
They emerged from the woods, hundreds of paces west of where they’d entered.
The disposition of the battlefield had changed utterly in the minute or three Kip and Cruxer had been gone. As ordered, the Nightbringers had collapsed into a tight-packed square. They were surrounded on all sides by the Blood Robes, and held only because of the luxin walls they’d so hurriedly assembled.
Men deeper in the formation were reloading muskets and passing them forward again. It was perhaps the first time in military history that muskets were being used to good effect after the first shock of an infantry charge.
But the numbers were still too lopsided. They’d held out this long only because the cavalry had been drawn away.
And now the Blood Robes’ reinforcement battalion was coming in. Their cavalry was lowering their lances and charging.
A signal flare went up from a wight near the killing field.
The wight had disarmed the Blood Robes’ explosives. Dammit.
Kip’s timing was off by just that much. Lorcan had needed to hit them thirty seconds ago.