Wartime was, I concluded, worse than peacetime. Almost two weeks was more than enough to come to a definitive resolution on the matter.

In peacetime, there was nothing to do. In wartime, there was rarely anything to do. In peacetime, you spent your time doing drill or on guard against nothing. In wartime you spent your time doing drill or on guard against an enemy that, should they attack, you would have no chance of stopping alone.

In conclusion, if being a guard in peacetime was like being a canary in a birdcage, being a guard in wartime was like being a canary in a coal mine. Very little changed except for the increased risk of death.

Every couple of days, the Torreans would re-open the tear -- something to do with energy accumulation, according to one of the other Mourners who had family in magical side of things -- and we would face an hour or two of frenzied onslaught from infantry screened with heavy mantlets and creatures that should not exist. Then our scholars would complete something as a countermeasure, the rift would snap shut, the screaming would stop, and the Torreans would withdraw in good order behind their shields and the nearest buildings.

In the first couple of days, there was some variety as the Torreans jockeyed for a better position and we sallied out in counter sorties, but it rapidly stagnated, as Major von Staffen had said, into their forces being too unruly to be moved too much without our own sweeping in, but our own forces being too far numerically inferior to crush them in open combat without the advantage of the fortifications.

In a word, it was a stalemate, and in two, a boring stalemate. We were left passing time and waiting for the Temple Guard to arrive -- an action that would inevitably break the standoff, and near certainly in our favour.

On the thirteenth day, the situation was completely upset.

At dawn, nothing seemed amiss. The 2nd Battalion was posted along the ramparts, being too diminished to offer much value on the ground, and I was enjoying the fact that for once it was not raining. I had been issued a new black bicorne, with a shiny silver cockade, my coat was actually completely dry, and I’d even managed to get my shirt and breeches laundered. The day was remarkably pleasant; about as pleasant as it could be, standing on a wall waiting for an army of men to fire lead balls at you while an army of demons tried to scale the wall.

The gate had been closed off in the aftermath of the first bloody battle, at least, which meant the aforementioned demons were the only means of breaching the walls the enemy seemed to have on offer. Truly terrifying if they made it over the rampart, they were still mostly bound by physics and could be dislodged by hurled bricks, flanking fire, or vigorous application of a pikestaff, so we were holding steady with no signs of strain.

This morning, the screaming started again around the toll of seven, as usual. In a diversion from the course of events I had grown to expect, no demons were forthcoming. The Torrean army was in evidence, moving behind the nearest blocks of buildings, but they remained in abeyance for now.

“Strange,” Remarked Bauer. “Think they’ve run out of stomach for the fight?”

Sergeant Dietrich just shook his head. “Never assume the enemy’s not going to stand, gefreiter, that’s a good way to end up in a coffin. No, I say they have some new devilry for us.” He stepped up to the firestep and spat over the rampart.

As if the glob of spittle had set off an explosion, there was a deafening crack and the very wall shook. Dietrich, still looking over the balcony, swore loud and long.

“Sergeant?” I asked, uncertain. Even the first emergence of the demons hadn’t shaken him this badly. “What’s happened?”

“They’ve only breached the bleeding gate! Not a cannon in sight, but they’ve cracked it open like a bloody eggshell. Seven metres wide if it’s an inch!” He swore again, and stepped back off the firestep.

“What do we do, sarge?” Bauer asked.

Dietrich blinked. “Same as always. Load and make ready, gefreiter. Then start praying.”

I had barely rammed home the bullet when another echoing crack sounded from behind us. I reflexively ducked for cover, then turned.

“Immer, Queen and heavens,” I quietly swore.

A new line split the sky behind the rooves of the palace; a new keening scream filled the air, the two sounds mixing and fighting like two flutes playing a fraction out of step, beating at the ears and the soul like an army firing a volley every second.

A leutnant shouted something from further down the wall, and Sergeant Dietrich yelled out in his usual battlefield voice. “Eyes front, gefreitern, the enemy isn’t sleeping!”

I spun on my heel and mounted the firestep, only realising halfway up that the ramrod was still down the barrel of my flintlock. Flustered, I tamped the bullet down again just in case and returned it. By the time I had it at the ready, shots were already barking out all along the wall, fresh clouds of smoke building up as though to hide the coming carnage from the heavens.

I looked over the wall to where the Torreans stood in massed ranks beyond the killing ground, and where nightmares streamed towards the breach, and hesitated. Should we be firing at the infantry, densely packed so one could hardly miss? Or the demons, the immediate threat?

I didn’t know if Sergeant Dietrich saw my indecision or had heard an order or seen a signal I hadn’t but in either case he shouted to aim for the demons. I had to lean out over the rampart, lowering my arquebus halfway to the vertical, before I could line it up with something that looked like a boar with the wings and legs of a fly. I pulled the trigger, but the cloud of smoke denied me knowledge of the result.

Dietrich yelled again and I hopped down from the firestep, reloading. In the time it had taken me to fix my ramrod and pick a target Bauer had already mostly finished reloading, and he stepped up into my place. When he stepped down, I stepped up. For a long moment, we held that cadence. I didn’t dare waste the time to look behind us into the courtyard, but I feared the worst. The fire from the walls wouldn’t be enough to prevent infantry forcing the breach, how could it stop aberrations that could keep going through multiple shots?

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

My fears were confirmed a moment later, as a bugle called from one of the towers of the palace proper. For the second time on the frontline, the order was called up and down the ranks of the 2nd Battalion: retreat in good order. This time, there was no pair of fresh battalions waiting behind us. No, this was a fighting withdrawal, an effort not to leave men stranded on the walls who could be fighting in defence of what truly mattered.

I finally allowed myself to look back at the courtyard, the butcher’s yard we’d have to cross to the safety of the palace building. A line of pike and arquebusier were barely holding. As I watched, a great bullish thing smashed through the centre, and I winced.

Sergeant Dietrich shouted something, and mechanically I presented my arquebus, aiming almost straight down and praying the cartridge paper would stop the bullet rolling out the barrel, and fired down into the horde of monsters.

Another order, I pivoted left and marched five steps. Stop, reload, aim down again, pull the trigger. It became monotonous, like the first great battle. Fire, march, reload, fire. Despite being hailed with fire from all sides, the flow of demons was unstemmed, and the ever thinner line in the courtyard was losing more ground. I had yet to see any sign of activity from the tear behind the palace, aside from the noise beleaguering us all, but that only made me more nervous.

The sole mercy for us on the balconies overlooking this charnel mass was that the demons were largely not equipped with any means of threatening from a distance, and the idea of discipline was anathema to them. They advanced forward only, and it allowed us to descend the wall, raining fire all the way, with almost no casualties.

When I set my foot down on the cobbles of the courtyard, I came to a grim realisation: soon there would be no more room for volleys down here. Echoing my thought, the order went around:

“Sling arquebuses!”

A pause. I took off my hat to duck my head through the strap on my flintlock, stowing it safely out of the way behind me, hissing at the heat as it went past. I’d just returned my hat when the second part of the order came, that was a source of terror to friend and foe alike:

“Draw steel!”

I drew my scimitar. It was, like, all the Mourners’ equipment, a marvellous tool of death. In the black and silver motif it was highly polished, with a forward-curving pommel wrought like a breaking wave, black leather in a herringbone wrap around the grip, and a deeply downward-swooping forward quillon. All of the fittings were of the highest quality steel, however, not silver. A practical weapon. The gentle curve was viciously effective as well as elegant.

It was also a weapon, I was uncomfortably aware, that was about to require me to engage creatures perhaps two to four times my mass in direct combat. Never before had I quite so fervently envied Sergeant Dietrich his half-pike.

I nodded to the man himself, and to Bauer, in the line next to me. They returned my nods, and, a moment later, I heard Major von Staffen bellow from somewhere on the stairs:

“Charge!”

And then we were rushing forward to the enemy mere metres away, but so shrouded in powder smoke they seemed a kilometre off. A few people cheered, a few whooped.

“Immerland! Immerland! The Queen and the land!” I heard myself scream, and then the ranks of the 1st Company were on our left -- the crisp black and white sullied with smudges of grey and splatters of red -- and the enemy was in front of us, and I slashed wildly at whatever hulking thing was in front of me. Fechtmeister Doren must be rolling in his grave, I wryly thought as I swung the scimitar like a hatchet. He had taught me the cutting sword as the pinnacle of human close weaponry, and here I was using it like a cleaver.

Still half daydreaming, I watched a creature like a bear with a locust’s head swing a meaty paw at Bauer, who had lost his footing on the blood-slick cobbles. I absently took a step and lashed out gracelessly with my sword, interposing it between bear and Bauer at just the right moment to separate wrist from forearm.

“Keep your head in the battle, Bauer!” I yelled, strangely giddy.

Something made a meaty noise on my other side, and I flinched as Sergeant Dietrich pitched a smaller, man-sized something off the end of his half-pike.

“Idiot!” He yelled at me, saying everything and nothing. I shook my head vigorously to try to clear it. The demons were pressed on every front: the 1st Company battalion in front, another battalion of the 2nd Company on the far flank, and us on this flank, and it was butchery. There was a reason not becoming encircled was one of the greatest priorities in warfare. We simply had more angles from which to attack any enemy.

For a moment, near-death experiences notwithstanding, I felt we had a chance. Then I heard the first bellow from behind us. Behind us, where there should be nothing except a fifteen-metre-high curtain wall.

For the second time that day, the bugle called the retreat, but I could not for the life of me see how we could do it in good order. In front of us, the demons coming in through the breach; somewhere behind us, the walls; and somewhere else behind us, something making that noise.

In a stunning display of the discipline and prowess that made the Queen’s Guard, 2nd Company the most exclusive in the Empire, we managed to maintain a fighting retreat for about five metres. Unfortunately, for the furthest wings the distance to cover was closer to thirty.

I was near enough the 1st Company ranks that I had joined in their retreat, helping hold the flank against the new attackers, but for many of the rest of the 2nd Battalion there was no such recourse, and I found it hard to feel grateful for making it out as the ranks I’d come through hell in were split apart and forced back to the walls, fighting all the way.

I halfway severed some kind of chitinous limb lashing out at me, forcing my focus back onto the present. I could mourn the disaster later. Now was the time for fighting.

Step by step, we gave ground backwards until we were near pressed up against the building, and I could only hope the officers had a grand plan, that we wouldn’t be stranded out here to die fighting to the last man in a delaying action.

Something slashed down my shoulder before I could catch it, ripping through the thick felt of my jacket to bounce off my collarbone, then the belt holding my cartridge pouch. I paid it no mind, counterattacking with a vicious thrust that slid off something hard into something soft, although I couldn’t tell what. I yanked the scimitar back and gave another step of ground. The pikeman behind me was as close to the wall as he could get and still use the unwieldy weapon. I took a deep breath.

This was, I feared, the end of the journey for the 2nd and 3rd Battalions of the 2nd Company, and whichever battalion of the 1st this was. Something with a lot of limbs swung for an overhead haymaker, and I raised my scimitar to block it, bracing the blade with my left hand. I deflected the blow, but the motion provoked a rush of blood from my shoulder. Peculiar; I had thought the blow earlier had only been blunt, from a fist or a hoof or whatever appendage that creature had had.

Another blow came in, and my arms buckled under the blow this time, turning it but leaving me exposed.

A moment later, everything went white.

“Inside! Heavens’ sake, man, move! Inside!” The pikeman behind me was screaming in my ear, and though the courtyard was still clouded with smoke and screaming with the dual agonies of the rips in the world, the bestial howling was gone.

“I thought I was dead,” I remarked to him thoughtfully. “Couldn’t take another hit like that.”

“And you will be dead bleeding soon! Move, man!”

He gave me a shove, and with a start I realised that the rest of the line was a few metres away, hurrying through the palace doors. I double stepped to catch up, the pikeman muttering imprecations behind me the whole way.