Lord of Order by Brett Riley (the reading list book TXT) 📕

Troy glanced at the herald one last time and then turned his attention to the battle. Where’s Mordecai and them?

Don’t try to talk. Looks like he damn near crushed your voice box. Take your pistols and join the party when you get your breath.

The others, Troy said. Several bullets struck the bridge nearby. Both men ignored them.

Tetweiller sighed. Tommy Gautreaux’s dead. Shot from the saddle and stabbed like he was a pincushion. The rest are still upright, as far as I know. You gonna take these, or should I hang em from my ears?

Troy accepted the guns as Tetweiller turned and shot a Crusader off her horse. You gonna take that sword? Troy asked.

You kiddin? the old man said. I damn near threw my back out swingin it once.

Tetweiller disappeared into the calamity. Troy knelt against a dead horse for what meager cover it could provide and reloaded with trembling hands. His shoulder buzzed and pulsed. His throat was misery. His knee had gone numb. Above, a sky so blue it hurt his eyes; below, the river flowed on and on, heedless and eternal. Tetweiller had looked ten years younger. Battle fever, hands and feet and eyes performing the tasks for which they had been made, better than any other restorative. Troy touched his mangled face and winced. Swelling, lacerations, deep bruising, a putty face twisted out of true. But Dwyer was dead.

Now the rank and file. Smash em into paste or accept their surrender, but leave no threat to the city. This is your callin. Get up and answer.

He took a deep breath through his swollen lips, not yet daring his nose. All right, he whispered.

He raised his pistols and stepped forward.

Then the pavement shook again. To the north, thousands riding and running for the bridge, LaShanda Long and Lynn Stransky and Jack Hobbes and Santonio Ford leading them, firing into the boiling maw into which Tetweiller had disappeared.

The new forces rode down the old, smashing into the Crusaders, stampeding them, splattering guts and brains with guns of every make, cutting throats and lopping off heads with blades confiscated from the dead, bludgeoning with whatever they had found—loose bricks, two-by-fours, broken handles from shovels. Royster’s Crusaders found themselves with missing limbs, shattered spines, stove-in heads misshapen like pumpkins someone had stepped in, burst abdomens. Here a Troubler fell; there a Conspirator was pulled from horseback, his or her killer soon ground to paste under the mob’s boot heels.

Troy leaned against the bridge’s warm railing and watched.

Laura Derosier fired her scattergun, nearly cutting a Crusader in two. She brained another with the butt and executed him as he lay at her feet. A third Crusader broke off from a group and aimed at her as she reloaded, but some Troubler blew his face off with a close-range shot. Fifteen feet away, Mordecai Jones sat on a male Crusader’s chest and alternated pummeling the man with his left hand and firing a revolver into the crowd with his right. Antoine Baptiste had holstered his firearms and now used a machete to hack away at a Crusader, who tried to shield himself with a shotgun until Baptiste switched angles midstroke and cut off his fingers. One vicious double-handed right-to-left stroke later and the man’s head rolled down the bridge, tripping up a group of Troublers. They went down in a heap and someone’s weapon discharged, hitting no one. A guard rode by and shot Baptiste in his upper thigh. He fell and rolled and struggled to his feet, grimacing. Troy shot the Crusader off the horse.

Tetweiller had mounted up again. Screaming something Troy could not hear, he led two dozen men and women armed with hatchets and axes and hoes and knives, perhaps one or two guns among them. They ran into a group of Crusaders and slashed away, blood misting above them like smoke. Tetweiller shot and reloaded and shot some more, his horse leaking from six or eight wounds, a gash across the old man’s forehead spattering his chest with red droplets. Stransky and Hobbes fought back to back, one shooting while the other covered, turning and turning, bodies falling around them in concentric circles. A guard charged at Stransky mid-reload, a spear of some kind raised over his head. When they spun, Hobbes shot the man in both kneecaps. The spear clattered at their feet. Hobbes picked it up and threw it. The blade disappeared in another Crusader’s back, and he screamed until Long’s horse trampled him. She swept back and forth among the groups, shooting Crusaders, bashing their skulls in with a cudgel she had picked up somewhere, rallying troops into better positions. The chaos gave way to a more organized wave of bloodletting, Conspirators pushing Crusaders against the bridge’s railing and killing them there or driving them over the side, where they fell screaming and were lost in the waters below. Here and there, Troy shot someone and reloaded.

In minutes, it was over.

Victors picked through the bodies, dragging their wounded or dead friends and kin back to the streets, cutting throats when they found a lingering enemy.

Long dismounted and made her way to Troy, who sat on the pavement, his weapons holstered, feeling the day’s weight in every part of him.

She stroked his injured jaw with one hand. It’s good to see you alive. Though you’ve looked better.

And you’re a vision, he rasped. Thanks for comin. She unstrapped her canteen. He took it and swigged, the water burning his lips, his throat. Everybody alive? he asked.

She looked back toward the crowd. There’s way too many folks to keep up with. Santonio’s shot up some, but he’s still on his horse. Mordecai got winged. Somebody amputated Laura Derosier’s pinky toe with a paring knife.

A paring knife. In this mess?

Believe it or not.

He laughed, then groaned. Could be worse, I reckon.

Yeah. We lost some good folks today, but they lost a lot more.

For a few moments they sat together, taking in