Only the Honai of the Great King’s bodyguard stood firm. Ten thousand heavy infantry, superbly armoured, they moved into rank with a discipline that baffled their fellow soldiers and took up position like a rock around which the waters of their lesser brethren whirled and rippled. Midarnes, their general, stood at their rear, and here Vorus found him standing as stolid as some ancient reared-up stone.
“Hold them,” Vorus said. “We must stop them here. Dawn is not far off. When the sun rises, things shall take a different turn.”
Midarnes was a nobleman of the old school, as high a caste as one could come at in this Empire without becoming a king. In the dark his eyes shone pale, looming over Vorus. He looked down on the Macht renegade without rancour, with even a shade of respect. “Your people,” he said, “are worthy of the stories.” Then he straightened. “You had best see to the flanks. Here in the centre, I shall hold them.”
In songs and stories, the lines met with a great clash and roar. Sometimes this was true. But in the dark of that rain-swept night on the hills of Kunaksa, the Macht and the Great King’s Honai melted together in a wicked hedge of spearpoints lit up by the kicked sparks of dying campfires, a cataclysm introduced at walking pace—blind, savage, and bloodier than any legend.
Rictus was in the front rank. The initial contact was a glimpse of pale gold, and then a massive impact of some great creature’s shield upon his own. He felt the breath of the thing on his eyes as they were pinned there, breast to breast, by the weight of the ranks behind them both. He stabbed out with his spear, as did his opponent, but they could not stab at each other. They were held there in a vice of flesh and blood, this thing a foot taller than him, its thighs moving against his own in a strangely intimate struggle through the muck underfoot. He butted the thing in the windpipe with his crested helm, and its weight gave a little. Immediately, the press of the men behind sent him forward. His opponent slid downwards. There was the smell of blood, the scrape of bronze, and the thing was at his waist, his knees, and then under his feet. He stamped down on it with his bare heel, one strike encountering the hard jar of bronze, the second snapping something of flesh. Then he was propelled along again, and he knew that the sauroters of those behind him would take care of it. Another face, another form, impossibly tall, with the same eyes. The panic to be fought, until he locked down the fact that the aichmes of those behind him were at work. One of the great eyes went dark, and again, the thing slid down, clunked earthwards to be kicked and stabbed in the ankle-deep muck, the flesh robbed of the spirit, the advance continuing. Those in the rear ranks were still singing the Paean, a hoarse, dry-throated rasp of defiance. Rictus smashed his shield forward into the line, aware now of the light indomitability of the cuirass he wore, the different balance of the transverse-crested helm. I lead these men, he thought calmly. They look to me—to this black armour, this crest.
I must be better than this, he thought.
And so he used his gangling strength to butt forward into the enemy line, his feet sinking deep into the mud, the foreign silt splaying his toes as they took the weight. He pushed his way into the Honai ranks with no skill or courage, merely a black determination to see the thing done. And before him, the Honai were shoved backwards, lowering their shields as their balance went—and into that gap the aichmes of the Macht stabbed pale and dark, silver and bloody, and a gap was opened out, and the shield-wall of the Honai was ruptured.
Vorus felt the balance of the thing shift, even in the dark, even in the epicentre of that great, flailing cauldron of violence. The lines of Kefren spearmen before him seemed to shudder, like a horse twitching off a fly. And then there was a sullen, agonising falling back. It scarcely seemed possible that the tall Kefren of the Honai could be physically pushed back by the Macht, but this was happening. They were not retreating; they were being killed up at the front of the line faster than they could be replaced, and they were being physically shoved backwards.
They will break, Vorus realised. He was not entirely, intellectually surprised, but he was still shocked. After all these years in the east, he had thought the Honai of the Great King unbeatable. He had forgotten too much about his own heritage.
The line broke. Not the wholesale rout of the day before, but a bitter, sullen retreat. It was like watching a flock of starlings, at one moment so black and dense as to fill the sky, the next, a scattered shifting cloud opening up into something else. The Honai did not turn their backs on the enemy, but fell back step by step, and as they retreated so their formation was scrambled. No longer a battle line, it was fast becoming a mere dense crowd of individuals.