We
stepped our mastodons to the front. Jerem Cozak turned back to me as all the
squads maneuvered into place behind us. “By the Profusion,” he said. “If we had
valkyries we could have wiped them off the face of the world already. Spearmen
would never even have to shoot.”
“No
reserve?” I asked him. “We’ll be leaving our rear defenseless.”
He
shook his head. “The fortress they came from is empty or distant enough that
nothing could reach us in time. But you will practice your art when we reach
the walls.”
Then he
turned, urging the matriarch to a trot. I followed. Behind us, the infantry
marched in double-time, slowed by the mud and rain and darkness. Mastodons saw
better. Mastodons moved better, with their broad feet. The wedges, each more
than three hundred mastodons wide, spread out as we went, one behind the other,
and all following Jerem Cozak.
The key
to a mastodon charge, Julius once taught me, was to cover the entire field and
shatter each enemy formation, because unlike valkyries, there simply would not
be in many cases enough room to turn everyone around. So you charged once. And
you spread out your wedges a bit so that the successive lines behind you could
reach what you couldn’t. And you armored your flanks and mounted spearmen on
top and hoped that thousands of mastodons bearing down upon them would frighten
and decimate the enemy just as much as they would have terrified and broken
you.
Something
happened, then, because my vision wavered for a moment. When it returned I no
longer saw the herd as we were. Instead we became a succession of apparitions
forming up in the darkness, clouds of thickening whiteness, but in the shape of
mastodons and men. I looked through my
mastodon’s eyes and saw that she saw this as well. I remembered, then,
the herds of mastodons flickering in and out of sight upon the beaches of
Sepira, and laughed. The Swarm had just made us invisible to the enemy, but
visible to each other. The Augers would never know what hit them. So we surged
forward in double time, and the line of the wedge covered the entirety of the
width of the saddle. It was wider than the enemy’s lines. It felt broader than
the world. At three hundred paces, we started seeing the limbs and heads and
armored forms of the Augers, the golden arcs of disks, three paces wide and
high, all illuminated by their own fire. At two hundred paces, they heard or
felt the ground shaking with our advance and turned and cried an alarm, at what
I do not know. Jerem Cozak brought the herd to a half-run, or canter.
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