The fucking bitch fired.

  By Joseph’s arse, what hands did he think he was playing with here? There it was—the last ragged scrap of parley, spat away by a force that would chop us into pieces and eat us if it suited them. Fuck me to death. At least the Gustavians would have the decency to do it properly if no one else would.

  “It begins, you sacks of shit!” I roared. “Here it comes! If you have not killed a foe by the end of this, I will have your head!”

  The cannon crew beside me turned as one. A red-nosed cuirassier, eyes already watering from powder and cold. A few peasants fit for nothing but boiling shit and hauling weight. And a boy—I refused to contemplate why he was even there.

  They stared at me like I was a saint commanding them straight into heaven.

  Then they moved.

  The drums across the river shifted immediately.

  A cadence I did not know—but I knew what it meant all the same. We were about to be turned into mincemeat. Horse, cannon, men—everything they had was about to feast upon us. I felt it settle in my gut, heavy and certain.

  “If you shoot before the fort commands,” I snarled, “my axe will find your throat. This is a promise. Muskets and blade only!”

  Nods came back at me, though I was sure half of them wondered what muskets I spoke of, seeing as they carried little more than ramrods, knives, and snot for weapons. Didn’t matter. As long as they heeded me, I was content.

  I wished Elrik was here.

  He could have softened my blows. Given the fatherly touch I lacked. Said the words that steadied hands without breaking bones.

  But he wasn’t.

  So hard blows would have to do in his stead.

  Whines and barks rose from the hill yonder. We could see the horses now, straining under heavy loads, men yanking at reins and shouting as they readied them for burdens meant to tear earth apart. Cannons were coming. Of that there was no doubt left.

  At least the fort would be their first target. The blasted thing stood proud and obvious, every gun on its walls begging to be answered. Let them chew on stone and height first. Our feces-stained ground artillery was, I hoped, hidden well enough to survive the opening feast.

  “Kesselbruck axemen!” I roared.

  They turned. God help them, they turned as one.

  They had been trained—same as me—in the art of slicing and dying. No powder for them. That was reserved for cannon and muskets, for men who stood farther back and pretended distance made things cleaner. These were the iron shield, the sharpened edge meant to catch whatever broke through.

  A mix of too old and too young faced me. Axes in hand, ranging from deadly relics passed down through blood and famine, to rusted junk that had split more firewood than skull. It would have to be enough.

  “We will find the fight,” I shouted. “The breach. Whatever threatens the lives of your children, your wives, your whores, and otherwise. Any Gustavian that gets close—we cut the balls off.”

  Sporadic laughter burst out. Thin. Cracked. Born of fright more than humour, just as I’d expected.

  “Do not laugh at me,” I snapped. “The one that delivers a testicle too few will be beaten to pulp.”

  That sobered them.

  A song of some form rose across the river.

  Angry. Raw. Shouts folding into answers, voices snapping back and forth in a call-and-response rhythm meant to strip thought from the skull. I caught fragments through the haze and thickened dialect—kill, God, cause, blood. Old words, old work. The sort of chanting barbarian tribes used when they bit shield-rims and axe-heads to make their blood rise and their fear drown.

  They were readying their minds for war.

  We would not be spared.

  Horses whined to the south of the river. Hooves trampled, earth beaten flat under weight and impatience. A force I could only imagine, hidden by plain sight—terrain doing their work for them, the land itself complicit.

  I scoured the hill again.

  The cannons were up.

  “ALL DOWN!” I roared, and hurled myself into the muck.

  The rest of the bastards followed. The green ones folded like fair maidens fretting over ruined ball gowns, hands flailing, faces pale with the sudden intimacy of dirt. The others—those like me—went flat without ceremony. We knew pride spared no one when iron went searching.

  Then came the impacts.

  Sick sounds. Wrong sounds. Stone crushed into dust. Mud swallowed hot iron with a wet, choking thud. Wood shrieked as it split, a living thing torn apart. The earth bucked and shuddered, and the trench breathed filth into our mouths.

  The first barrage had hit us—together. Perfectly together.

  From the sound of it, they were aiming for the fortress indeed. Their aim could have been better, though, seeing as they grazed us down here as well. Close enough to remind us we were not forgotten.

  Moments later the thunder arrived—the cannons’ voices lagging behind the balls they’d flung. A cruel joke of distance and speed. A reminder that death always reaches you before it announces itself.

  They had fired in unison.

  Of course they had. Everything with them had to be so damned perfect.

  I pushed myself up, mud tearing free of my coat, and looked again.

  A new sky had formed atop the hill—white with powder smoke, settling heavy over the enemy line. Through it, shapes moved. Ghosts in discipline. Men already readying for another volley, untroubled by the destruction they’d just sewn.

  They were not finished. Neither were we.

  “More will come! The cannon will cover their advance!” I shouted, teeth clenched hard enough to ache, eyes raking over the axemen’s faces—searching not for courage, but for comprehension. For the simple understanding that this was it. That the waiting was done.

  “Follow my every step!” I bellowed. “None lags behind! We head south!”

  They answered me—mouths moved, bodies shifted—but I did not hear a word of it. Our own cannon chose that moment to speak. This time the blast came first. A clean, brutal thunder that punched the air flat.

  Then came the rest.

  Things breaking. Stone screaming. Wood snapping like bones. And somewhere beyond the river, people dying—men who had believed themselves untouchable moments earlier.

  I grinned despite myself.

  We moved from the trench lines close to the fortress and out toward where the proper hell waited. The river lines. The southern front. What imbecile would dream of attacking north? They’d drown half their men before they could choke out “Gustav.” No. It had to be straight ahead—or south.

  And it was from the south the noise came.

  A Blemmye moved the same way, lumbering along beside us, hauling cannonballs like a grandmother carrying eggs to market. Careful. Steady. As if nothing in the world could make them slip.

  Did the thing have any brains behind its chest?

  “Blemmye!” I snapped. “Do you lust to blow our cover? If the enemy notices those cannonballs, the ruse is up!”

  It looked at me like it was considering a particularly funny joke.

  Then it bloomed red.

  Whines like killer insects screaming toward impact tore through the air. Shots. Clean. Disciplined. A full line loosed at once.

  Red sores opened across the Blemmye in the blink of an eye. Dark blood spilled freely from some, thick and slow. One of its eyes burst, ruined, collapsing into itself. Still—that insane grin stayed carved into its flesh.

  Infantry fire had landed.

  I saw nothing.

  Felt nothing.

  I had been spared.

  One of my greener idiots wasn’t. He took a shot to the flank and went down crying, hands slick and useless against the hole torn into him. A younger boy dropped his axe where he stood, skin already turning the pale waxy shade of the dead.

  He knew.

  And so did I.

  The Blemmye trickled red like a summer shower as it bowed down to tend the wounded and the dying before it. The blood ran freely, dark and steady, yet it seemed to heed no damage at all. That frightened me more than its strength ever could.

  “Heads down, sodden fools!” I roared. “Crouch as you go—don’t let them see!”

  No ayes came back this time. I only hoped they listened.

  Fire answered fire. Spatters of embers and bursts of sulphur smoke erupted across our lines. Some shots went wide, scattered and panicked. Others struck together, unified under command. For a fleeting moment—brief as breath held in frozen air—our side felt strong again. I was glad then that we had the means to make the God-fearing whores dread the afterlife, if only for that heartbeat.

  The moment did not last.

  Obscene impacts of iron found us again. A section of the upper eastern wall blew open as if it had never existed at all, stone and mortar vanishing in a roar of dust and force. Below, the lower wall rang like a church bell struck by an angry devil as an iron support beam took the hit dead on, the sound shuddering through earth and bone alike.

  Fewer shots struck the trenches now.

  Their aim was improving.

  We had to move.

  Across the river, amidst the leftovers of our hellspawned battle, I could see them now—clear enough to make the blood tighten.

  Rows upon rows upon rows. Four—five men deep. Some half-cowled by the smoke of their own firing, shapes blurring and reforming as the haze drifted. Others already finding their collective aim, shoulders settling, barrels rising together, each man hunting the same small miracle: a head in the wrong place.

  At least—I noted it grimly—I could see some dead. Dark shapes crumpled where they had stood, trampled or left behind without ceremony.

  But there they were all the same. The bulk of it.

  The southern trench line was choked full of blue-clad Gustavians. They mirrored their brothers across the river to a fault—clean lines, drilled posture, uniform to the bone.

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  And dying.

  A thunder of bullets rang out from the river. The mud blistered under the impacts, kicked apart in wet bursts, and so did our folk. Blue uniforms bloomed red. Some dropped where they stood, ended outright by a lucky hit. Others crouched low, hands roaming their own bodies, prodding and pressing—measuring pain, counting breath, trying to decide if what they’d taken was death or merely its warning.

  Imagine that.

  Traitors to their own blood, choosing to stand with us bastards instead.

  How bad must things have been, to make that choice feel like the better one?

  A storm had risen now. Thunder and rain and sudden white flashes tearing the clouds apart. The very guise a truly bloody battle might choose to wear. For hundreds of meters in both directions there were flashes upon flashes—muzzles flaring, powder igniting—whines of lead cutting the air, screams of iron striking stone and flesh, the sound of men singing their swansong without ever knowing the words. Horses screamed and fouled themselves to death beneath their riders, eyes rolling white as the world came apart around them.

  I had never seen anything like it.

  I had seen blue marshes that pulled the bones from anything living. Stones that grew the faces of loved ones, only to crack on the very day of their death. The Silver Dunes by the Salt Steppes, raining silver pellets upward toward the stars as if the earth itself wished to wound the heavens.

  This was worse.

  More horrid.

  More beautiful.

  More strange than anything I had ever seen.

  A sudden collapse of the air beside me tore me out of my god-awful musings. A sensation like a void being filled all at once—pressure snapping shut—followed by a shriek worse than any vexed barmaid ever loosed in drink or fury.

  Then the mud beside me burst.

  A symphony of dirt and blood.

  Then another.

  And another.

  From south to north the nightmares walked us down, eight pounds at a time.

  Whoever had been beside me was turned to sausage from the breast up—meat pulped and spread, loose arms hanging by shreds of tendon, fingers twitching long after the rest had learned better.

  A Gustavian scrambling for a better firing position took one square on the legs. They bent backwards, crushed to ruin, bone bleached and poking through cloth and skin like chalk snapped in half.

  A Blemmye took a direct hit to the shoulder.

  The ball rang against it—an iron bell struck too hard. Its massive, accursed flesh absorbed the blow, taking the force whole. The arm would never be used again all the same. The shoulder had collapsed into a sack of trembling gelatin beneath it, useless weight hanging where strength had been.

  Cannons.

  Here?

  Aiming at our mud?

  The hill was not their only battery. There was more. Somewhere unseen. Somewhere patient.

  How many?

  How close?

  And worse—was more still coming?

  An arm seized me—grip like an ox, manners like a mongrel. Eskil. That brute. He’d lost his tricorn; a bloody nick in his scalp had taken its place. A direct hit wouldn’t have troubled him much, I was sure. The man thought with his balls at the best of times.

  “Are you the reserves?” he barked. “What am I to do with toddlers holding axes? The fucking charge is coming!”

  I shoved his bulk back a step and caught a glimpse of mud between us shifting—earth lifting, settling, hungry. My anger might have saved one of us in that instant.

  “I thought your blue-tinted donkeys were worth their weight in gold!” I spat. “Can you not shoot? Or are you too daft to aim?”

  His face flushed to the color of fresh blood. He didn’t answer me. Instead, he rounded on one of his under-officers, struck him hard with the flat of his sabre, and jabbed the blade toward the slaughter beyond the river.

  “Guide volleys to the southern ranks!” he roared. “Kill anything that might cover them! If I do not hear three volleys a minute from you, I will cut you down!”

  The underling—and his fifty-odd musketeers—stiffened at once. They looked more afraid of Eskil than of the cannonballs that had already torn some of them apart. With a ball, at least, a man could hope for a quick end.

  Eskil turned back to me, breath steaming, eyes bright with fury.

  “Johan, you sour fucking whore,” he growled. “I command the best men there are. What do you bring?”

  A sharp drumbeat halted my harangue before it could even finish forming. It came from the river yonder, followed by shouts and answering calls, voices carrying with a purpose that set the teeth on edge.

  Then suddenly the blue-clad bastards were far more exposed—and far closer—than they had been moments before. The river no longer looked like an obstacle at all. Three ranks of the fuckers rose from the marsh, wet and shivering, yes—but crossed all the same.

  Eskil paid me no further heed. He bellowed down the line instead, voice raw and commanding.

  “The fratriciders come! Mow them down! Give the murderers no quarter!”

  Our side did not lack ranks to answer. Soot-caked lines of Grenzland’s proudest loosed their fire in ragged spatters, and blue-clad allies added their own condemnations in gunpowder and flame.

  Enemy combatants fell like wilting flowers in a rosebed—some quiet and sudden, others flailing and shrieking as if hoping for a final role on the Hasholm stage. Pikemen surged out from behind the newly raked musket lines, steel points lowering in practiced unison, as the advance became less a threat and more a certainty.

  Here they came.

  The poor fools had no notion of what was coming for them.

  Blood boiled in me. The axe in my wrinkled hands felt warmer, heavier, more real as I glanced down its length. Rusted. Old. Yet bent in the fashion of our people—the barbarian’s axe made anew. It was not forged to crush. It was made to slice. Mine had been shaped for the roll call of my village. To slay. To maim. To answer the foul in the only language they understood.

  As the fumes in my soul boiled over, I roared.

  I was no longer myself.

  I was a ghost hauled up from the past—the younger, braver fool who once held an axe with pride, before reality proved that pride a lie. Years had passed. I had grown old. But the fire was still there all the same, banked and waiting.

  The pikes drew closer. Another volley had cut some of them down, but counter-fire dulled our edge. Now it was time to crouch and wait for the killers to close, to thrust through any who came unready.

  Were they prepared for what we were?

  I rose and lifted my axe to the sky. It was long, like my men’s. Scarred, pitted—but it still carried the weight I needed.

  “AXEMEN!” I bellowed. “RISE PROUDLY—FOR NOW YOU WILL KILL!”

  The old men and the young boys were neither, then. I felt something rise in them as it had in me. The same anger. The same hunger to spit death in the eye and strike him first. Teeth clenched. Eyes sharpened. Hunters’ gazes met mine—men ready to stop dying.

  And finally start killing.

  Some of the pikes had reached the trench by then. They peeked over our heads like snakes searching for flesh to prod. That was our moment.

  I rose.

  I caught a pike bare-handed and wrenched it aside, the point made useless in the same breath as I stepped forward. My hands closed around the haft of my axe, both of them now, weight settling where it belonged. I meant to cut the nearest fool in half.

  The owner of the pike saw me coming. Blue-clad. No armour worth the name. I would go straight through him.

  I lifted my arms cleanly, feet planted firm, and the axe met his face. His cheek came away as if peeled, the blade biting on into his shoulder blade. Bone snapped—loud, sharp—cracking above the scattered ring of muskets nearby.

  The blow landed true.

  My axe came free.

  Several other Gustavian whores were beside him, their weapon points stretched meters ahead, braced for musketeers meant to be skewered like pigs. Instead, they were to be bled dry.

  My fools were up as well, following my lead—ducking the points, slipping inside the reach, finding the soft flesh that mattered. The overhead strike was the trained maneuver. Two hands. Full commitment. Slicing down through the centerline—faces, necks, lungs, hearts.

  The first rank of doomed pikemen fell apart under it.

  Then we formed.

  I was no commander. I could not herd men by tactic or merit. But I could lead our bones. The dance we had been taught. The march of the axe.

  Stamp the foot. Let the next man follow. Shoulder to shoulder. Axes flashing dull and bright through the smoke haze. We cursed their mothers, glorified our fathers, praised God—and then moved one step and killed with the next.

  Together, we held the pikes. We slapped aside their points, hacked at shafts, cut down legs and arms that reached too far. We took ground steadily, through nothing but rhythm and blood.

  As promised, we gave death to any who came for the men of Grenzland.

  Muskets rang out. Some shots came for us—slipping through gaps in their pikemen, folding my men where they stood by sheer force. Others went the other way, thinning the drenched ranks of musketeers meant to cover the pikes we were butchering.

  I cut for hands.

  Fingers. Palms. Feet. Knees. They parted cleanly. Some dropped their pikes and clawed for daggers or clubs instead. We seized their arms, locked them in place, and others hacked them down like lambs at slaughter.

  Iron whined overhead. Cannons hunted for a mark, but their own—soon to be dead—choked every clean line. Any ball meant for us would tear through ten Gustavians first. Their mass betrayed them.

  A nose severed.

  A jaw split clean in two.

  A belly opened.

  Arms scraped lengthwise, flaying cloth, muscle, sinew together.

  A boy was run through by a pike and folded where he stood, his axe still clenched in his hands. A bearded bastard staggered back, both hands clawing at an eye violently ruined by a lucky shot.

  The horror reached us all.

  But only one side had lost the battle of will.

  The pikes broke. Musketeers lingered a heartbeat too long before a well-directed volley sent them reeling, breeches a shade browner, the mud a shade redder.

  We hacked at any fool too slow or too daft to flee fast enough—cleaving ankles, chopping legs, tearing them down and finishing them in the mud before death could decide its own pace. The rest—the pitiful pikemen who had come to kill and found themselves butchered instead—ran.

  The muskets did not stop.

  They kept ringing, sharp and merciless. An old grandfather—beard white and long enough to brush his arse—buckled as four shots struck him together. He fell without ceremony. More balls found us, bit into flesh, slapped into bodies, or punched deep marks into the blood-red mud. Enough, at least, to tell us plainly that our work here was done.

  The Kesselbruck axe had bested the Gustavian pike.

  Something in me stirred. A spark long since reduced to embers flared back into flame—hot, defiant, and stubborn enough to refuse dying.

  I had bested my foe. I had killed. I had maimed. I had held my ground. I had not run. I had not abandoned my brothers or my men. I stood with them still, and kept what could not protect itself safe behind our line.

  “YOU BRAVE BITCHES!” I bellowed, lifting my blood-stained instrument high, heedless of shot or cannon. “YOU HAVE MADE ME PROUD! THE KILLING CONTINUES—STAND PROUD AS YOU MAIM AND SLAUGHTER!”

  The roar of my command followed—tired and hoarse, ugly in its sound, earnest in its need. Nicks and wounds and sweat marked every one of them, but the pride of what they had done shone through all the same.

  My men had made me proud.

  That thought barely lived a heartbeat.

  Whines cut through it, sharp and sudden, as echoes of death passed so close I could taste Hell on my tongue.

  A boy—no more than sixteen, if my eye was worth a damn—folded in half. He struck the dirt faster than any bullet and ceased to be.

  An older fellow, one I had watched personally cut down five pikemen, took a shot to the temple. The ball flicked his head aside like a child’s marble, and the back of his skull met his spine with a sound I will never forget.

  Three veterans died to a single ball. One man struck another, the mass carried through, and all of them ended together. When the smoke thinned, a heap of armour and limbs was all that remained to suggest they had ever lived at all.

  The enemy had retreated.

  And so, the enemy saw fit to aim at us again.

  The win had been too clean. Too pure. The joy I had felt should have warned me. No world ever allows the taste of victory to linger long.

  “BACK TO THE TRENCH!” I shouted. “KEEP SAFE, SO YOU MAY KILL AGAIN!”

  The words rang hollow even to me. Stupid, perhaps. I no longer knew what I was.

  Was I a foolhardy commander leading the lost?

  Or a bitter old nag, refusing every call and banner laid before him?

  I did not know.

  I threw myself down into the bank, blood and foul water mingling around me like lovers reunited. Others followed—some quick, some late—but fewer than I had hoped. Our perfect march, our trained killing dance, had nothing to say against a properly packed tube of powder and ball.

  What was the fucking point?

  A pike would have been cleaner. At least then it would have been personal. I could have looked into the eyes of the baby-faced fool who ended me, offered a goodbye, a thank you, spat on his boots as my last courtesy.

  A shot had no thought.

  A ball cared nothing for who it found. Man or mud made no difference. A lump of nothing, ending everything.

  Eskil found me there. A grin had split his ugly mug wide, eyes shining too bright, staring at me as if I were Joseph resurrected from the dirt itself.

  “So that is what I was sent,” he laughed, voice thick with awe and madness. “Fuck, Johan—you ended them rightly.”

  I looked at him. At his blue-clad form. At the blood-smeared mug he wore like a badge. At the men behind him—firing volleys, then slumping over dead in the same breath.

  And I had nothing to say.

  More shots rang out. More whines of unthinking death searched for us, blind and indifferent. A pack of Gustavians on our side folded as ball found ground, bodies dropping like sacks with their strings cut.

  “Hold fast, you old son of a bitch,” Eskil said, hauling me upright. He dragged me to eye level, my boots scraping until they found the uneven purchase of blood-soaked mud. “The charge comes. We will need your strength.”

  I found my feet. Stood as best I could. And looked.

  Horses.

  Riders bearing banners and spears spread across the accursed mire ahead of us, fanning out with grim purpose. Rows of guns behind them. Rows of pikes. All of it advancing, steady and sure as hell, straight toward our line.

  A unison crack of defiant fire thundered from our side. I saw men fall—poor sods caught wrong—but the rest kept moving. Always forward.

  My hands were slick with blood. My thighs burned where pikes had kissed too close, where musket fire had come near enough to remind me how thin the margin truly was.

  I listened to the horses—terrified beasts forced onward, fear pounding through them as hard as through me—closing in so their masters could kill.

  And I stood there, thinking.

  A moment too long.

  Long enough for the deed to come for us.