Surprisingly the Awl wedges more or less held to their formations, although they were each maintaining considerable distance from their flanking neighbours-once the space drew tighter, she suspected, the wedges would start mixing, edges pulled ragged. Marching in time was the most difficult battlefield manoeuvre, after all. Between each of them, then, could be found the weak points. Perhaps enough to push through with the saw’s teeth and begin isolating each wedge.
‘Wardogs on the knoll!’
She spun at the cry. ‘Errant’s kick!’ Frenzied barking, shrieks from the weapon crews-‘Second reserve legion-the Artisan! Advance on the double-butcher those damned things!’
Obscurely, she suddenly recalled a scene months ago-wounded but alive, less than a handful of the beasts on a hill overlooking an Awl camp, watching the Letherii slaughtering the last of their masters. And she wondered, with a shiver of superstitious fear, if those beasts were now exacting ferocious vengeance. Dammit, Bivatt-never mind all that.
The Awl spear-heads were not drawing together, she saw-nor was there need to, now that she’d temporarily lost her ballistae. Indeed, the two northernmost of those wedges were now angling to challenge her Crimson Rampant medium. But this would be old-style fighting, she knew-and the Awl did not possess the discipline nor the training for this kind of steeled butchery.
Yet, Redmask is not waging this battle in the Awl fashion, is he? No, this is something else. He’s treating this like a plains engagement in miniature-the. way those horse-archers wheeled, reformed, then reformed again-a hit and run tactic, all on a compacted scale.
I see now-hut it will not work for much longer.
Once his warriors locked with her mailed fist.
The Awl spear-heads were now nearing the flat of the riverbed-the two sides would engage on the hardpacked sand of the bed itself. No advantage of slope to either side-until the tide shifts. One way or the other-no, do not think-
A new reverberation trembled through the ground now. Deeper, rolling, ominous.
From the dust, between the Awl wedges, huge shapes loomed, rumbled forward.
Wagons. Awl wagons, the six-wheeled bastards-not drawn, but pushed. Their beds were crowded with half-naked warriors, spears bristling. The entire front end of each rocking, pitching wagon was a horizontal forest of oversized spears. Round-shields overlapped to form a half-turtleshell that encased the forward section.
They now thundered through the broad gaps between the wedges-twenty, fifty, a hundred-lumbering yet rolling so swiftly after the long descent into the valley that the masses of burly warriors who had been pushing them now trailed in their wake, sprinting to catch up.
The wagons plunged straight into the face of the Crimson Rampant heavy infantry.