"It never ceases to amaze me the number of things that can go wrong simultaneously
and in such a short amount of time."
-Colonel Louis Greycloud, 24th Land Regiment
River District,
Kaska . . .
As the hot afternoon sun burned overhead, First Platoon and the accompanying gendarmes moved to surround their target, an innocuous-looking warehouse nestled between two tenements, some distance away from the waterfront. The unforgiving weather had long since bleached its once white bricks, colouring the entire structure of a sickly, pale yellow.
Although looking solid enough, signs of abandon were clearly visible. A thick layer of dust coated the large windows at street level, blocking the interiors’ view, while the wooden doors were rotting around their hinges.
“A charming place for sure,” Bronze Tail commented sourly. He spat on the ground. “Is that it, then?”
Stockade came over by his side and nodded. “It doesn’t look like much, does it? I’ll bet we probably overlooked it during the last sweep, since it had been unoccupied for years.” He then added with a grin, “Or so we thought, at least.”
The sergeant major grunted in agreement. Having spent a fair share of his youth in a street gang in Manelan, the place looked as the perfect hideout to him; spacious, unoccupied and away from the city’s main thoroughfares. Besides, the Nilus being just a block or two away granted an easy escape route. No wonder then that the local smugglers were operating from that place.
He put aside those thoughts at the sight of Corporal Mudclaw approaching him with a uniformed pony gendarme trailing behind. He came to a halt before him.
No salutes were exchanged. They were in the field now.
“We have the building surrounded and the checkpoints readied. According to him,” he gestured at the unicorn, “two additional sections of gendarmes are standing by the north side. They’ll take care of the perimeter once we move in.”
“Have they noticed something unusual?” Bronze Tail asked. He knew the Gendarmerie to have fliers in the air and on nearby rooftops, keeping an eye on the warehouse. Not too closely though; they didn’t want to give those smugglers a head start.
Gerus shook his head. “Not in the last two hours. Before that though, they have seen quite a few sphinxes entering the building. None of them have come out since.”
“Good to hear it,” said Stockade. Then, turning an eye at his gendarme colleague, “Please tell Sergeant Caltrop to keep away any onlookers peacefully, if possible. Me and the soldiers will handle the rest.” The unicorn nodded and trotted away to report the message. Bronze Tail cast a quick look around.
The street, crowded with ponies and zebras just ten minutes before, was now empty. The Gendarmerie had cleared quickly any and all civilians from the site before establishing their checkpoint at the street’s ends.
It hadn’t been easy, of course. Many had complained, especially local shops’ owners, on the account of them scarring off their clientele. The most stubborn had required a bit of persuasion from the soldiers of First Platoon before finally shutting up and following the instructions.
A crowd of locals had gathered beyond the wooden barricades. They seemed just curious so far, but with a mob you could never be sure. Bronze Tail still remembered a couple of nasty incidents involving masses of angry civilians from previous assignments. He shuddered for a moment, hoping they would get bored eventually and go back to their homes.
Gerus waited for the unicorn gendarme to be out of earshot before continuing. “I’ve heard we might be dealing with about twenty of them. This could get bloody very quickly.”
“Yes, I’ve heard that too. What about entrances?”
“There are two to cover,” he answered readily. “We can breach them simultaneously and catch those sphinxes in a crossfire.”
“Regarding that, corporal,” Stockade said at length, “I don’t think there’s the need to remind you or the sergeant major here that our task here is to arrest them.” He smiled. “After all, corpses are not very talkative.”
Bronze Tail nodded. “We’ll try to keep in mind, but I make you no promises if they start shooting,”
“And please, refrain your soldiers from taking anything from there,” he added. “I understand that valuable items tend to slip into pockets by their own volition, but those are to be considered proofs in an ongoing investigation.”
“Yes, I know,” he waved at him with a hoof. “As I said, I don’t do miracles, but I’ll see what I can do.”
He turned to the griffon. “Corporal Mudclaw, I want your section covering the road with the gendarmes while we enter. Keep the fire support with you.”
Gerus arched an eyebrow in confusion. “You sure about that? Redriver can clear the way nice and easy for us.”
“Yeah, but that was before I saw the sorry state of this.” He gestured at the warehouse. “The last thing I want is to bring the entire building down on our heads with explosive-tipped arrows. So your section gets to sit on the side-lines for once.”
He was half-expecting a retort coming out of Gerus. Thankfully, he was much more cool-headed than his fellow corporals and kept his beak shut.
The standard Owlstrian tactical doctrine prescribed each platoon had to be implemented with an additional fireteam tasked to provide fire support, be it magical or of other kind.
However, a combination of sick leaves, different assignments and problems with supplies had caused said team to be reduced to Wilhelm Redriver alone, which made him too valuable to be risked in a direct action.
“Understood, sergeant. I’ll leave the fun to you then,” Gerus said quietly, nodding. However, Bronze Tail noted a slight, irritated twitch at his beak’s corner.
He guessed the griffon did not like the idea of stepping off the field so that Rusty or Icewind could have free reign. Talos only knew what those two could do if left unchecked.
On the other claw, he personally liked the idea of explosives in closed environments even less.
With that matter resolved, Sergeant Major Bronze Tail reached with a hoof for the radio receiver fastened to his belt, unbuckling it and switching to a pre-determined channel. “This is Cardinal to all callsigns. We go in in two minutes.”
“Look alive. The party starts in two minutes,” Helena whispered.
Every creature replied with a nod. Her section had taken position at either side of one of the entrances, a wooden, medium sized double door. Two gendarmes were also with them, both griffons, and armed with revolvers and batons.
Helena hadn’t bothered to learn their names, and she still saw no point in doing so. The Gendarmerie could act tough all they wanted, but they inevitably ended up calling in the regulars when things got hot. They’d still keep the merit to themselves though.
“Be careful,” one of the griffons ‒the female one‒ said. She removed her weapon from the holster, pushing back the hammer with a claw. The gun clicked. “We don’t know how many there are inside.”
Helena kept herself from rolling her eyes. “We’ve already been in firefights, I’ll let you know. We’ve got this.”
“Good for you, but this is no warzone. Try to leave one of them alive,” she drawled.
Helena bit back a retort. Her tone reminded her of one used by her old schoolteacher a couple of decades back, when he ordered her to behave and not make a mess.
She turned to her second, an earth pony by the name of Glue Stick. “Pass the word around that we’re doing it by protocol.”
The yellow-coated stallion raised a questioning eyebrow but nodded and carried out the order.
Meanwhile, she caught with the corner of her eye a smug grin forming up on the grifoness’s features. Instead of irritating her though, she found it highly amusing. She had to keep herself from chuckling in anticipation.
Helena didn’t know what by protocol meant in the Owlstrian Gendarmerie, but in the Army was a synonym of if they have a gun, shoot. She doubted the bitch would have kept smiling after a first-claw demonstration.
“One minute,” the sergeant-major’s voice came from her portable radio. Those battery-powered devices had been a Talos-sent benediction for the Owlstrian Army, at least regarding short range communications between sections.
Helena still remembered the time when heavy, bulky devices carried in backpacks had been the only ones available at platoon or company level. Besides, being picked for communication duty back then meant to carry around a huge bull’s eye painted on your back.
Now, according to the latest rumour in the barracks, there were even plans about issuing a communicator to each trooper!
That would have certainly been a great improvement, though Helena dreaded to think of the resulting radio chatter. Give an idiot a radio and he’ll find a way to make a mess out of it.
“Thirty seconds to go.”
Metal clanked as several Crystal rifles’ levies were yanked down and then back up. In spite of its name, the weapon was more akin to a carabine, capable of producing high volumes of fire but not very useful on long ranges. It was outdated, but still considered reliable enough.
Private Glue Stick and Private Shallow Spring took point, bracing their respective shoulders against the wooden doorframe; being a unicorn, the latter’s weapon hovered mid-air, a faint blue aura barely visible.
“Twenty.”
“Does anypony have grenades?”
The voice, belonging to private Joseph Kite, came from the back a bit louder than intended. Every creature, Helena in the lead, turned to glare at the griffon. The gendarme was looking at him too, but more in astonishment than anything else.
“What? I was just asking.”
Corporal Helena Icewind sighed. “That’s the point, Kite. You were asking instead of being quiet.”
“And no, we don’t. None of us have them. You can thank their boss for that,” she added, gesturing with a claw at the only two blue-uniformed griffons present.
The grifoness opened her beak to retort, before the second gendarme convinced her otherwise with a nudge. She limited herself then to simply shot a glare at Helena which, in turn, she easily ignored.
“Ten seconds.”
“It would be nice to have just a couple of those new flashy ones, you know?” grumbled Shallow Spring as she adjusted her weapon’s sight. “They aren’t lethal.”
Devis Starcrest shook his head. “No way in Tartarus we could get one of them, let alone enough for our section.”
His left claw drummed nervously on his combat knife’s hilt, secured in a sheath at his side. “Only Vanguards get that stuff.”
“They always get the best, those pricks,” spat Mountain Spike.
“Hey! Shut up!” The grifoness snapped. Her scowl had only deepened as the idle chatter dragged on. “Can any of you at least try be seriou-”
“Zero. We’re breaching now,” came the signal, as if on cue.
The section exploded into action as a loaded spring. Two earth ponies bucked the door open with enough force to rip it off its hinges. Wood groaned, then splintered as it crashed down on the warehouse’s floor.
The dust hadn’t settled yet as the soldiers moved inside, rifles raised as they went. An instant later, the set of double doors on the warehouse’s opposing side was kicked open, followed by the sight of Rusty Blade’s section storming through.
Corporal Helena Icewind advanced right behind Glue Stick, using her rifle to cover his left side as he kept his one ahead. Shallow Spring and Starcrest mirrored them on the right side, allowing the four of them to cover a 180-degree angle.
The rest of the section came behind hot on their heels, with the gendarmes entering as the last ones. Helena blinked to adjust her eyes, moving from the brightly lit outside to the much darker interior.
“Clear!” Glue Stick announced. Similar calls echoed from all around.
“Corporal? I think this may be the wrong place,” Private Kite muttered.
Helena took a moment to have a better look around. She realized that the warehouse wasn’t clear. It was utterly empty.
“Kite, be silent for once,” she hissed. “Section, spread out and look around.”
“For what, corporal? This place looks emptier than the desert,” Glue Stick pointed out.
“Then make sure it is, private.”
In truth, there was little point in doing so, as the interior only confirmed a state what was already clear from the outside.
The air inside felt warm and stale, carrying the typical heavy smell of an environment kept closed for years. The floor was utterly barren, aside for some pieces of junk and broken pottery laying around. Large cracks were visible in the walls where the mortar coating had fallen off in large chunks.
Helena turned to address the Rusty’s section and the gendarmes with them, who had in the meantime moved in the middle of the building to join her own. They too looked confused and, in some cases, rather disappointed at the lack of action. After all the pre-combat build-up, they felt cheated.
“Hey, Rusty,” she called out. “Can sphinx turn invisible?”
“I don’t reckon they can,” the mare replied with a shake of her head. “Are we sure this isn’t the wrong place?”
She shrugged “No idea about that, to be honest. Give me just a moment.” Helena looked over her shoulder at the two griffon gendarmes. “Hey, you two! Why is this place empty?” she shouted not too gently.
The grifoness opened her beak to retort just as a faint booming sound echoed through the warehouse. Windows rattled in their frames as dust fell down from the ceiling and around them. Troopers eyed warily their surroundings, weapons at the ready.
“What in Tartarus-”
“Not now, Kite.” Helena tightened the grip on her rifle’s wooden stock.
“Oh, dear Talos above,” Rusty Blade muttered, before adding a rather colourful curse. That surprised Helena more than the explosion itself. She had never heard her swearing that openly.
“That came from the South Gate.” She snapped toward a nearby mare and shouted. “Lolly Pop, bring me the sergeant major here, now!
“And for the rest of you, sorry lot,” she addressed the rest of her section with a fierce glare, “get your arses ready to move out!”
The alarm in her voice caused Helena to raise an eyebrow.
Sure, there might have been an explosion at the gate, which had yet to be confirmed, but she saw no reason to get so worked up. She bet it was just some urchin with some noisy firecrackers.
Besides, as far as she could remember, no creature from 3rd Company had been assigned there.
Corporal Helena Icewind looked wearily around the empty space of the warehouse and sighed. Whether what was happening at the South Gate had any importance or not, her day had just gotten worse.
Kaska’s South Gate . . .
“I don’t care what he thinks his rights are,” the griffon stated. “I’m the officer here, so when I say that all the carts of this caravan are to be searched, I’m not asking. Am I clear?”
“Aye, sir,” said the sphinx. She wore a pair of blue and green armbands on her forelegs, highlighting her belonging to Kaska’s Civic Cohort.
As they weren’t a proper military force, the city’s administration hadn’t seen fit to spend on some real uniforms. Or proper weapons, for that matter; the old rifled musket slung over her back must had been a couple of decades old. She could at least speak Owlstrian, although a very basic one.
As he saw her walking away and up to the irritating merchant to bring him the news, Lieutenant Darius Falcon laid back against the wall and sighed in relief. Some creature had had the common sense of setting up a series of large awnings around the gatehouse. They didn’t stop the constant trickling of sweat down his forehead, but they still made his stay a little more bearable.
The merchant, a slightly over-weigh sphinx wearing a fancy red cloak embroidered with gold, was shouting again. Falcon had no idea about what; Sphigyptian sounded harsh to most ears.
He had never actually bothered to learn but a few words of the local language, as at the time he thought his assignment there to be temporary. Things had turned out to be different.
“He cries a lot, doesn’t he, sir?” came a known voice.
He looked up to see another griffon standing beside him. The newcomer unbuckled a water canteen from his belt and tossed it to Falcon. The feeling of fresh water rushing down his throat was one of those small things that no creature, griffon or pony, would have never appreciated before seeing Sphigypt with their own eyes.
“That it does, Greg. Any clue of what he’s talking about?” Unlike him, Sergeant-Major Gregory Buzzard knew his fair share of Sphigyptian.
“Oh, it’s just the usual rambling. He claims to be an honest entrepreneur who is being unjustly harassed by us and our lapdogs.” As he said that, he gestured with a claw towards the members of the Civic Cohort present at the gatehouse, five or six of them that early afternoon. The other half who was supposed to be there was missing, probably drunk or worse.
Falcon shrugged at Greg’s words. The Free Republic of Akhri was itself an Owlstrian lapdog, whenever the sphinxes liked it or not. “Anything else?”
“He also complains that these things don’t happen on the Nilus’s western bank, or something like that.”
Falcon couldn’t keep himself from barking a laugh. “So much gratitude for keeping the pharaoh away from them!”
“So it would seem,” the griffon replied dubiously, scratching idly at his lower beak. Falcon noticed that he was glaring in the well-dressed sphinx’s general direction.
“Somethings bothering you?”
“As a matter of fact, yes,” he said, his tone dropping to a whisper. “I’ve made some checks on the registers about what he was saying before, and apparently he’s right. His caravan is indeed scheduled to depart from the city.”
Lieutenant Falcon said nothing; he could smell a but coming from miles away.
“But what our friend there forgot to mention is that the caravan was to leave two days from now.”
Falcon’s eyebrow shot up in sudden interest. He was half tempted to ask confirmation, but he doubted there was any need. Similar to many cities on this side of the Nilus border, movements in and out were kept under close watch by the local Owlstrian constabulary. And did those ponies love their damn registers.
“Sounds like he’s leaving in a hurry then,” Falcon mused.
“I’ll wager that he’s running away from something. Angry creditors, I’d say.”
“Whatever it might be, you know the captain’s orders. Besides,” he added, “for all we know, he could be a spy.”
“Shouldn’t we let the Gendarmerie deal with him, then?”
Falcon shrugged. “Those are Blackwing’s orders, sergeant. I’ve never said there was any sense in them.” Or in him, for that matter, but he left it unsaid.
It was then he noticed that the cries of protest had suddenly subsided. He turned his attention toward the pair just in time to catch the merchant rummaging in the inside of his brightly coloured cloak.
Then, with a masterful paw movement, he slipped something out of it and into the sphinxess’s own paw. She was not as good as him in hiding it though, and Falcon’s keen eyes caught a glimmer of gold before it disappeared beneath her rugged outfit’s fabric.
“Try not to turn now, sergeant, but I think the pockets of our Arif just got heavier.”
“Really, now?” Buzzard said. He smacked his beak a couple of times. “I was half-tempted to let the merchant go, but that he paid the Civic Cohort instead of us is profoundly insulting, sir.”
A mischievous grin split Falcon’s beak. “My exact thoughts, sergeant. I said we should do something about it.”
He glanced towards the caravan. Six sturdy-looking, covered wagons were arranged in the courtyard beside the gatehouse, limited on three sides by a waist-high brick wall.
Its members were a mix batch of sphinxes, earth ponies and zebras, the latter two being the actual ones doing the pulling. The sphinxes, two for each cart, were content of staying in the driver’s seats.
Then Falcon noticed the whips at their sides. From there, his eyes went to the ponies, four of them for each vehicle and tied to a horizontal pole in pairs.
Some wore an assortment of rags, just enough to cover their heads from the sun. Freshly healed scars, running in a crossing pattern on their bare backs, were clearly visible.
Lieutenant Darius Falcon felt his stomach twitching in disgust.
Slavery, mostly of earth ponies, had been a brutal reality in the Kingdom of Sphygypt for countless years, booming especially in the easternmost provinces. Only a couple of decades had passed since Pharaoh Khaf-Hor the Second had finally abolished the archaic institution.
De jure, of course.
True, he might have been a total dimwit, but he had at least managed to do something half-decent.
Akhri and its surrounding region had never accepted it, given how the local clans had grown rich and fat on the slave trade; they decided to simply turn a deaf hear to Thebanus.
After all, somepony had to work in the farms and plantation along the Nilus, and who was better suited than an earth pony? A noble sphinx warrior could certainly not lower himself to such menial task.
The rest was history. Akhri had seceded to form its own petty kingdom at the first occasion and, in a cruel twist of faith, the Owlstrians had found themselves protecting the same institution they had fought against just five years earlier.
All to keep the bloody pharaoh off the Nilus’s eastern bank.
None of them was happy about it; Darius Falcon, whose stepmother was an earth pony herself, least of all.
“Free Republic my ass,” he heard Buzzard spat. He had noticed too the ponies tied at the wagons.
Falcon nodded. “Today is not really his day, it seems,” he said, eyeing the merchant. “Get me Breaching Charge and her section, would you? I think we’ll all enjoy this.”
“Are you sure, sir?” the Arif asked tentatively.
“Yes, it’s settled,” Falcon announced in a firm voice. “My soldiers shall take care of the search themselves. You don’t need to bother yours, Arif.” Much to Falcon’s amusement, the merchant failed to keep his eyes from going wide with shock.
“B-but, sir, we w-”
“Do you know,” he said almost nonchalantly, “what the penalty for Owlstrian military personnel caught in the act of receiving a bribe is, Arif?” Her jaw hung open for a moment, her mind coming slowly to grasp the meaning behind those words.
“I though not,” he continued. “Just as I believe you don’t know that the punishment can easily be extended to auxiliary personnel too.” In truth, the Civic Cohort wasn’t an auxiliary detachment, being part of Akhri’s military forces, but the chances of her knowing that were slim in the best-case scenario.
“Oh, sorry for interrupting you, Arif. You were saying?”
Unsurprisingly, she didn’t have anything important to say. With a half-hearted salute, she excused herself and went back to her own unit in an effort to put herself as far away as she could from what was about to happen.
Seeing that, the merchant started to visibly sweat; and for once the weather had nothing to do with it.
It had a lot to do instead with the entirety of Third Platoon arranging itself in a semicircle around him and his caravan.
Once Lieutenant Falcon had told her his idea, it hadn’t been too hard to convince Corporal Breaching Charge to take part in the action.
She was a unicorn mare, her coat a bright yellow while her mane, gathered in a bun half-hidden beneath her hat, was pink.
And just like any Owlstrian military personnel, she would haven’t missed the chance of pissing of a sphinx slave-owner for anything in the world.
The other two corporals, Malcom Ravenclaw and Lemon Twist, had tagged along shortly after. Ravenclaw, the youngest of the three, believed it to be the right thing to do; Twist simply because he was immensely bored of garrison duty and wanted something to shoot at.
Falcon strode up to the merchant with a predatory smile, Sergeant Buzzard following him suit.
“A good day to you, sir,” he began. “I’m afraid we’ve found some irregularities in your permit, so we’ll have to search all your carts and crews.”
At a flick of his claws, Corporal Breaching Charge took two ponies from her section to escort her for a closer look at the caravan. Her horn glowed a pinkish red, ready to cast a searching spell.
Sphinxes glowered at them from their driving seats but did otherwise nothing.
Falcon went on unfazed. “We ask of course your full collaboration to speed up the process. I apologize in advance for the inconvenience.”
If the shock from seeing ponies about to perform a search on his caravan wasn’t already visible, it became all too evident when he heard Buzzard repeating the instruction in Sphigyptian, just for good measure.
To his credit, the surprise quickly vanished under a wave of outrage.
“This is criminal!” he cried out in surprisingly good Owlstrian. “You have no authority to do it!”
His head snapped towards Charge. “Hey! Keep your dirty hooves off my wagons!”
Breaching Charge ignored him. The glow radiating off her horn grew in intensity. She directed the flow of magic to envelope the vehicle in a faint red aura.
One of the sphinxes jumped down from his seat, his face almost livid in rage. He was about to walk up to her, but he was stopped by the pair of soldiers who ordered him not too gently to get back on the cart.
The sphinx, a rather young one by his looks, spat on the stallion’s uniform.
An instant later, a buck to the chest sent him staggering back and sprawling in the dirt. Cries of outrage rose from his companions.
“And now you assault my employees and clansmen too!” A growl was building up in his throat. “You stop it right now or I’ll have the Civic Cohort arrest you!”
“I’m afraid this won’t be possible, sir. However, you’re free to bring any complain up to my superior.” He omitted that they would just gather dust on the captain’s desk.
“Oh, rest assured I will, lieutenant,” he retorted. “I have many important friends back in Akhri. I’ll make sure to let them know about the abuse you subjected me to.”
“I don’t believe you understand how little I could care about it, sir,” Falcon said, his voice filling now with barely concealed fury. “If you’re done, I have a thorough search to supervise.”
He made to move past him, but the merchant blocked his path with a step to the side. He glared fiercely at him, lips peeling slowly back to reveal sharp teeth. “If you think I’ll just stand by and let some mud-sloggers touch my merchandise-”
“What a coincidence!” Falcon finally snapped. “That’s precisely what I expect you to do! Or what? Do you think we didn’t notice your transaction with the Arif over there?
“Here’s a suggestion for next time: if you want to bribe, make sure to at least know who’s the one actually in charge!” A tap on his epaulet further emphasized it. From behind, he heard some creature from Charge’s section chuckling softly.
The sphinx’s lips twitched just barely at that, before turning into a scornful grin.
“That’s your game, then?” he scoffed. “You have no real proof against me, so you just make them up. I shouldn’t be surprised; that’s the Owlstrian way, isn’t it?” He shouted this time, loud enough so that every sphinx in the courtyard could hear clearly.
Falcon glanced around. Sphinxes jumped down from their vehicles, all sporting a firearm or knife at their side. More seemed to emerge out of the carts, pushing aside the white canvas as they exited, until there were at least two dozen of them.
Soldiers shouted at them to get back in on their wagons but were promptly ignored. The only answer they received were sphinxes flashing their white teeth at them, mockingly.
Most of them had by now surrounded Corporal Breaching Charge and the two ponies with her.
Insults were shouted; Stone Quarry and Winter Purslane stood on their rear legs, visibly on edge, with their carabines levelled and ready. Strangely enough, Breaching Charge didn’t seem to care at the moment, focusing her entire attention on the spell.
“Tell your employees to stand back and drop their weapons,” Falcon said evenly.
He kept himself from swallowing; he had clearly miscalculated their intentions as well as their numbers. If he wasn’t firm in his intentions now, things could get very bad, and quickly.
“Or what, birdie?”
“Or you’ll get killed by a bunch of mud-sloggers. How does that sound to you?”
The idea seemed to give him pause, his expression faltering for a moment. Falcon kept the smile to himself this time.
If he remembered correctly the nearly byzantine Sphigyptian religious system and the various believes, fallen warriors joined their brethren in an otherworldly paradise. Even then, being slain by an inferior herbivore was widely believed in the local sect to be a shameful death, enough to deny a direct passage in the Grey Realm.
Usually, Falcon couldn’t have cared less about any of that crap, but Captain Blackwing insisted that all officers under him had the duty to know a bare minimum of the local customs.
And for once, Falcon was glad he had.
The sphinx looked at the soldiers, at his brethren, and then at the soldiers again, eyes resting with interest on their Crystal rifles. His previous snarl was all but gone, replace by more a thoughtful and neutral expression. He opened his mouth as if to say something before shutting it close.
“Sir!”
Lieutenant Falcon looked up from the sphinx and towards the voice’s origin. Corporal Breaching Charge was standing by one of the carts, the two troopers from her section standing closer. Her horn was glowing brighter than before.
“What is it?”
“I think we’ve just found someth-”
A rifle barked and the mare’s head snapped to the side. Knees buckling beneath it, her body dropped as a sack full of bricks in the dirt. Ponies and griffon shouted in alarm, and in an instant the courtyard exploded.
Falcon had no time to determine who shot first. Shots whistled through the air in every direction.
Owlstrians levelled their Crystal rifles and fired. Bullets struck the wagons; wood shuddered and groaned, then finally shattered.
Painfull cries filled the air as projectiles met living flesh.
With the practical easy of trained professional, the soldiers took shelter behind anything they could find, mostly crates and various pieces of cargo laying around – the courtyard was used for goods’ delivery, after all. Some went simply on their belly and open fire from there.
The sphinxes scattered for cover. Some found it behind their own carts, while others managed to vault over the low wall, hunkering down behind it. Bricks cracked and exploded with white puffs of mortar.
From there they returned fire as best as they could with their revolvers and simple guns. Others weren’t so lucky though.
The sphynx closest to Charge’s corpse, coincidentally the same one who had spat on Private Stone Quarry’s uniform, doubled over as shots ripped through his stomach at point black. He collapsed to the ground with a painful groan, clutching at blood-soaked robes covering his belly.
Winter Purslane and Stone Quarry swung their rifles around, searching for another target. They fired a second, then a third time. One sphinx stumbled as a bullet found her hind leg. A second dropped with a bloody hole in the back of his neck.
The two were trying to pull back towards their section when the sphinxes’ retaliatory fire found them.
A lucky bullet grazed Private Purslane in the side, ripping through her uniform. She cried in pain, causing her to drop onto the ground, blood pouring out of the ugly wound.
Seeing the disaster unfolding before his very eyes, Falcon shock himself out of his stupor and opened his beak to bark an order.
He caught the glint of steel with his eye’s corner.
“Behind you, sir!”
Falcon whirled around just in time to see the merchant charging at him, a curved knife in each paw, his cloak flying wildly behind as he went.
There was no time draw his revolver nor his own knife. Steel bit deep into his uniform and then into his side’s flesh. Pain flooded him, forcing the griffon to growl as he backed away.
The sight of his green uniform turning crimson only goaded the sphinx to strike again. He dashed forward for another strike, this time at the neck.
Falcon was ready though. Training kicked in, his mind pushing away any fear or pain and replacing them with iron-cold determination. Falcon dodged the blade easily.
The sphinx slashed again, eagerness taking over and causing him to overextend himself with another strike.
Falcon made him pay for the mistake as he lashed out with his own talons.
His sharp nails cut deep scars into it, slicing through flesh with ease and effectively making one of his eyes useless. Blood gushed as a river out of the injury, painting his face with the dense red liquid.
The sphinx howled and staggered back, dropping one of his knives to cover the mess on his face’s left side.
The injury wasn’t a fatal one, but the griffon didn’t give him another chance to use the remaining blade.
A fist-shaped claw connected against the side of his head. A second one came from the opposite direction. There was a soft cracking of bone, and his lower jaw shattered.
The sphinx staggered back again, almost drunkenly this time, pain and bloodied face rendering him effectively uncapable of striking back, despite the knife still in his paw.
He didn’t get far.
Out of nowhere, a rifle’s butt struck him again in the head. The merchant’s body went limp and finally crashed in the dirt.
Sergeant Major Buzzard went then to stand over him, a Crystal rifle in his claws and aimed at the downed enemy, making sure that he wouldn’t get up any time soon.
“Are you alright, sir?” Falcon heard him say. Or at least he thought he had said that. It was hard to tell with all the shooting going off.
By now the carts were more akin to a form of cheese that anything else, the wagons’ frame mangled by accurate weapon fire. Pieces of cloth lay scattered, the only thing remaining of the white canvases once covering them.
Ravenclaw and Twist’s sections were now moving on their respective flanks as they fired, planning to catch the sphinxes on three sides simultaneously.
Third Platoon’s only casualty still laid where she had fallen, unmoving.
Stone Quarry had in the meantime hoisted Winter Purslane on one of his shoulders and carried her away, while the rest of the section laid suppressive fire on the enemy.
A couple more soldiers had been struck and consequently dragged back. Their condition didn’t seem particularly worrying for now.
Of the sphinxes, half of them were on the ground now, screaming and convulsing in pain. Figures laid unmoving on the ground, but only some of them sphinxes.
Most were equines.
The slaves had tried to flee as soon as the fight had started, quickly unbuckling their harnesses and discarding them before galloping away.
With the shoots going off all around them though, they had panicked. Some had attempted a dash for the main gate and consequently struck in the savage crossfire.
They laid there now, their eyes open and unmoving.
Falcon swallowed hard and tried to avert his gaze from the scene.
It was then he noticed something sticking out from the underside of one of the wagons.
The thing resolved itself into a hoof. A better look revealed the hoof to be part of a young mare, tucked beneath one of the carts, her face twisted in terror with eyes opened wide.
Five others were huddled near her as they kept their heads down, as if trying to bury their own faces in the dirt.
Realization struck Lieutenant Falcon as a hammer, causing him to spat a curse.
“Cease fire!” he shouted at the top of his lungs. “Third Platoon! Cease fire!” Few heard him over the gunshots.
Falcon was about to cry out again, louder this time, when he realized he still had the radio receiver secured to his uniform’s straps. He moved his claws to unhook it.
A low hissing rippled through the air, followed by a louder series of crackles. Falcon felt his own fur standing on end. His mind had just the time to realize what was happening before Buzzard’s own voice boomed.
“EVERYGRIFF DOWN!”
Falcon closed his eyes as a bolt of lightning surged out of Specialist Red Ruby’s horn with a bright flash. It covered the distance in a blink of an eye and smashed squarely against one of the wagons.
Crackling electricity burned its way through, slicing it in half like a melon and striking the wagon parked behind.
And then the cargo caught fire.
There was a second bright flash, followed by a mighty roar. The wagon went up in a fireball.
A wave of hot air struck Lieutenant Falcon as a solid wall, knocking him off his paws and onto the ground. Pain exploded in the back of his head as it collided with the hard surface.
He didn’t know for how long he laid there. It could have been minutes or hours for all he knew. A ton of dust had fallen seemingly out of nowhere on top of him, and he had to blink hard to see something.
Eventually, his eyes caught a glimpse of a winged figure standing over him.
“Steady now, sir” said Buzzard as he helped his superior to stand. “That was a nasty fall you took.”
Been almost blown to bits was apparently not enough to rob the sergeant-major of his humour, he noted with unusual detachment.
Falcon painfully got up. His body felt as if it had been hammered everywhere at the same time. He had a hard time to focus his eyes on anything and his ears kept ringing like Tartarus.
He coughed a few times, only to notice that his uniform was entirely coated in yellowish dust.
As dizziness somewhat passed, he saw that the wagon was gone. In its place was a blackened, smouldering wreck, a heavy cloud of black smoke rising lazily in the air.
The detonation had scattered flaming and hot debris in all directions; most of them now laid harmlessly on the ground, having already burned out. Others had instead found their mark, and fire was spreading unchecked in the neighbouring wagons.
If they had struck anygriff though, Falcon couldn’t tell.
“Ruby! What in Tartarus were you thinking?” Buzzard snapped at the unicorn.
“That was just fire support, sarge,” was her innocent reply.
She wore a standard-issued Owlstrian uniform like everypony else, but with the addition of an enchanted green cloak. It was kept around her shoulders with a silver brooch, shaped as a six-pointed star.
The two other member of her fireteam, unicorns too, stood right behind her, clothed in a similar fashion.
“Besides, how was I supposed to know that they had explosives in that thing?”
“That’s why we check before shooting, you idiot!” Buzzard shouted back.
He would have kept on berating the mare, as any sergeant worth his salt would, but his mind focused on more pressing matters.
“Do me a favour and clean that mess up, will you? The last thing I want for today is more stuff blowing up.”
Specialist Red Ruby groaned softly, her eyes rolling. She then turned towards the pair of colleagues and started barking orders. They nodded, took position at either side of her and, as their horns glowed brightly, the unicorn trio began casting the spell.
Falcon felt the air all around him turning suddenly cooler; not too unpleasantly, he noted. Then, three jets of icy water erupted out of their horns.
The fireteam directed the flow upon the burning wagons, as well as the blackened wreck. Embers hissed and steamed before finally dying. Less than a minute later, all fires had been quenched for good beneath the cascade.
Now it was a matter of judging the damage.
As Lieutenant Falcon cast a glance around, Owlstrian soldiers got back to their hooves, or paws. Some of them sported fresh injuries from the explosion, cuts and burns caused by the flaming debris, and would require medical attention. Many kept visibly rubbing at their ears as they tried to get rid of the ringing.
A griffon from Ravenclaw’s section was laying on the ground and screamed in panic, clawing frantically at his bleeding ears, just as his companions were trying to pin him down, shouting to keep still.
The poor bastards couldn’t hear them though. His eardrums had probably ruptured.
For the sphinxes the situation was even worse.
The explosion had occurred almost on top of them. The wall behind which some had hidden for cover was now half gone.
Those who were not outright killed by the shockwave, had been consequently cut to pieces by flying bricks, the detonation turning them into big, high-speed projectiles.
What remained of the bodies were now visible, most of them burned beyond recognition. And some were not sphinxes at all, Falcon noted grimly.
“Sergeant-Major,” the lieutenant said at last. He struggled to keep down a growing tide of nausea. “Sent a message for immediate medical assistance back to HQ. Tell them to also dispatch the Gendarmerie, if possible.” He glanced towards the wreck. “I want to know what in Tartarus happened here and if there are more of them.”
Buzzard nodded. “Yes, sir.” He made to move away, but something halted him. “You need help, sir?”
“What?”
“You’ve got a nasty wound there.” The griffon said, pointing at his side.
Falcon’s eyes followed the claw. They widened as he discovered a large crimson stain on his uniform. The sphinx’s dagger had made a mess of it and a large, ragged hole was clearly visible.
He pressed it tentatively with a claw before flinching in pain. Now that the adrenaline’s effect had finally worn out, he could feel the cut a lot more clearly, and painfully too.
Falcon made the effort of keeping a straight face. “I’ll let the medics have a look at it, don’t worry.”
He then smiled, trying to assume an air of self-confidence. “But I reckon I just need a stitch or two. That’s all.”
Buzzard didn’t look convinced at all by his act. For unknown reasons though, he simply nodded and took his leave.
The Lieutenant didn’t watch him go; his attention was fixed on the remains of the burned wagon. There wasn’t much left of it now.
The image of the mare, huddled beneath the cart and staring right into his eyes, flashed again before him.
It was followed by a second one. She was screaming this time; fire enveloped her, cooking and then rupturing her skin, just as her fellow slaves burned beside her.
Falcon tried to shock it out of his mind. It was pointless; the image flashed before his very eyes again and again.
His legs started to trembled beneath him. He had to get out of there. He didn’t care how or where, but he just couldn’t stay.
His stomach kept on churning and heaving. Shaking, Falcon tried to catch a deep breath. He smelled smoke in the air, acrid and strong. The fire had died down by now, but it was still here.
It was just an impression, he thought. A mind’s trick, that’s what it was.
The sounds coming the griffon had ceased, replaced by a quiet sobbing. Falcon was still hearing it though.
He didn’t know how, but he kept hearing it clearly, the ear-splitting cry of a griffon hopelessly trying to hear his own voice in a now silent word.
This time he couldn’t keep it down. He turned and, still disoriented by the half-ringing ears, stumbled away, looking a private place to throw up. He managed to take a few steps before his vision darkened.
The last thing he remembered was the ground rushing up to meet him.
Kaska’s streets had gotten visibly more crowded in a matter of minutes. Rumours run wild, voices about an explosion that had destroyed the South Gate. Some spoke in hushed tones of Owlstrian soldiers swarming the Riverside, while others cried in alarm about the Pharaon’s forces, ready to cross the Nilus.
Uat ignored all of that. The sphinxess focused her efforts in carving herself a path in the crowd, trying however to keep a low profile at the same time.
There was no rush after all.
The old musket hanging from her shoulder was gone now, dumped in an alley after making sure of removing any trace leading to her. And given that most in the Civic Cohort wore repurposed every-day clothes, no pony or sphinx gave her more of a second glance as she passed by.
Her eyebrows furrowed in thought. True, matters at the South Gate had gone differently than she had planned, and in a rather violent manner at that, but at least her job was done now; Shabali was dead, his skull crushed by a griffon after a brief struggle, and that’s what really mattered. Her client couldn’t risk him falling in Owlstrian claws.
A sudden thought came to her mind, causing her to cast a quick glance down at her forelegs. The green and blue armbands were still there. That didn’t worry her too much; it could be easily resolved.
A few seconds later, two armbands of the Civic Cohort were laying unnoticed on the cobbled pavement, left to be trampled over and over, their previous owner disappearing into a side street, never to be seen again.