Chapter 302 -295: The Scroll
While marsh was still in reverie of finally killing a tank.
One of the three surviving warhound moved it’s main gun toward him and fire the shell.
The shell came apart with a boom in the air eleven feet from Marsh’s shoulder and went off at an angle into the mud a long way to the right.
"Captain!" Ilder was standing on the earthworks with one hand still up. "Get off that field. Now."
Marsh turned his horse.
And saw it properly for the first time since the wedge went in.
Less than a hundred riders still up. Out of four hundred. They were in among the three standing machines and still going at them — lances into the sides that stopped a hand’s width in and snapped, riders going round the back for the engine housings, one knight up on the hull of the nearest one hacking at a hatch with his sword as he had nothing else left.
None of it was doing anything.
Behind them the swarm was over the parapet at the fourth position and down into the trench, and the fighting had spread along the earthworks in both directions from the break.
"Recall!" Marsh had blown the horn out. "*Recall!* Break off and come in!"
The note went out flat across the meadow.
Breaking off was worse than going in.
Going in, a rider had speed and a lance and four hundred men around him. Coming off, he had a tired horse and his back to a gun. The top guns started firing again the moment the wedge loosened, and men who had survived the charge went down riding away from it — hit from behind at thirty paces, going off the horse into the standing water and never getting up.
The knight on the hull came off backward, landed badly, got up and ran, and made about forty paces.
Marsh sat and watched his detachment come apart a second time.
He rode past the machine he had killed and pulled up beside it.
Thirty tons of dead demon steel with smoke coming out of the hole in its joint. The hatch on the top had not opened.
He put his hand out and took it into his ring without stopping — hull, tracks, turret, gone off the meadow between one stride and the next. His horse staggered under him at the shift but he stayed on and kept riding.
"You are stealing it," Ilder said, when he came up the bank.
"I am salvaging it."
"You are riding off a lost battlefield with a thirty-ton demon war machine on your finger."
"Marlok told me to get inside one." Marsh came out of the saddle. "This was faster."
He looked along the line once.
Six cannons destroyed. Thirteen standing and useless, their crews still behind them.The infantry pushed out of the fourth position and losing the third. Ninety-odd riders coming in off the meadow, most on foot, some carrying men who could not walk.
And three machines that would start moving again the moment Idler stop holding them.
Marsh had commanded that stretch four years. He had written the earthworks up twice, asked for a second dwarf twice a year, and buried men off it every month since the spring.
"The line cannot be saved," he said.
The officer beside him opened his mouth.
"Do not." Marsh did not look at him. "I have held this ground four years and I will not argue about it with a man who has been standing beside me for the whole of the last hour." He turned. "Ilder. Two things and I need both."
"Say them."
"Hold those machines. Whatever stops them, put it on them now."
"And the second?"
"The scroll."
Ilder went very still.
"That scroll takes every man still alive on this line to the fortress at Halder’s Reach. One hundred miles." He said it slowly. "There is one of it, Captain. There is not another, and there will not be another."
"I know how many there are."
"You have carried it four years."
"And today is the day it was for." Marsh was already shouting past him. "Every man on this line! Break off and come in to the mage! Wounded first — carry anyone who cannot walk, and nobody stops to argue about who is carrying whom!"
Ilder put both hands up and shouted"Golden locking formation"
The chains came down out of nothing. Gold, thick as a man’s arm, a great many of them, and went over the three standing machines and round and round — over the hulls, through the tracks, across the turrets, under and over and round again.
The nearest had been traversing back toward the earthworks. Its turret stopped halfway. The second had been reversing, and the mud coming off its tracks stopped in the air and hung there.
"Golden Time Lock," Ilder said through his teeth. "They are now frozen for five minutes. Less if they fight it."
"How long can you stand there?"
"About a minute. After that somebody carries me."
He stood with his arms out and his boots sinking slowly into the mud, and the shaking started in his hands and then went to his shoulders. Two of his own people stood behind him, one either side, not touching him, waiting.
Out on the flat, one of the chains creaked.
"They *are* fighting it," Ilder said. "Move faster."
The infantry came out of the trench running as fast as they could. The rear ranks turned and went backward step by step, holding the demons off with spears while the men behind them ran, and then those men turned and did the same for the ones who had been holding. It went like that the whole length of the works. Nobody who was fighting could stop until somebody behind him was ready to take it up.
They lost men doing it. A great many but it stopped total rout.
The cannon crews came with their crystal boxes and — nine years of work in a padded case under each man’s arm, and nineteen cannons left standing in the earth behind them.
Hesk came past with the blood dried down the side of his face, his box under one arm and a wounded loader over the other shoulder.
"The seventh," he said, to nobody. "That crack in the frame. Two years he watched it."
Then wounded came in on shields, on cloaks, on the backs of men who were themselves bleeding. Two spearmen carried a third between them with his arms over their shoulders and his boots dragging, and none of the three of them said anything the whole way up the bank.
The riders came up on foot, leading horses that could still walk. The ones that could not were left where they were, and men who had ridden the same animal for three years put a hand on its neck and then turned round and walked away from it, and there were more of those than anyone wanted to count.
Bren Marlok came down off the parapet with a hand-axe in his fist. He had taken it off the wall of the third position an hour ago when the first demons came over. He had used it since. There was no part of him that wanted to talk about that.
"Ye took one," he said.
"I took one."
"Whole?"
"Whole."
"Then that’s the only thing about today I’m goin’ to be pleased about." Bren looked back at the works, where the swarm was over three positions now and spreading. "How long have we got?"
"However long he lasts."
Soon the last men came in at a dead run with demons twenty paces behind them.
The infantry at the edge of the crowd turned and set spears and held that. Four of them were still standing when it was over.
"Sergeants!" Marsh was up on a timber where they could see him. "Count your men and shout it. Now."
The numbers came back down the line, ragged, some of them from men who were not sergeants that morning.
"Third position, eleven!"
"Fourth position — there is no fourth position, sir. Six of us."
"Gun crews, forty-one."
"Cavalry, eighty-eight up and nine carried."
"That is everyone who is coming, sir."
Ilder got the scroll out of his coat. His hands were shaking too badly to hold it steady so much that one of his own people had to put a hand round his wrist.
"Idler read it fast and get us out of this," Marsh said.
Ilder brought his arms down, and the chains stayed where they were, wrapped round three machines but time was ticking. He tore the scroll open,soon a large teleportation circle started lightening up.
The last thing Marsh saw of the canal line was the fourth position sinking and thirteen cannons standing in the earthworks with nobody behind them to fire, and dimming of the locks around three machine whole they were desperately trying to break free.