by Frank Morin
The land seemed to writhe under the dense tangle of hideous summoned creatures, flowing north like a deadly tide. Monsters clawed over each other in their single-minded drive to reach the walls of Merkland. Whatever Anton had been doing did not seem to have accomplished much.
Thousands upon thousands of monsters remained. Some were small, shaped like sleek nualls or thick-jawed hunting hounds. Others were fashioned like armored torcs or even larger creatures that Connor couldn’t identify. They seemed to be bursting with long fangs, deadly claws, or burning breath.
Aifric whispered, “Creeping blade of death, there are so many!”
Connor did not see Anton. He wouldn’t be surprised if the mighty Sapper had sunk into the earth to protect himself from the swarm as they passed, but as he studied the road, he suddenly spotted Anton’s work.
A series of walls erupted out of the ground in front of the leading ranks of the monsters. A dozen feet wide, they reared over twenty feet in just a couple heartbeats. For a second Connor was not sure what Anton was doing because a staggered series of short walls like that would not slow that swarm at all.
Then the walls started to move. As the swarm of creatures boiled over and around them, some toppled forward with tremendous force, smashing to pieces any creatures caught beneath them. New walls rose immediately behind the first and slammed down in turn, like a giant waterwheel half sunken in the earth. Other walls smashed together, crushing monsters between them.
It was an excellent display of earth mastery, but did not seem to slow or even significantly thin the horde. With sinking dread, Connor realized that maybe they had underestimated the danger. “We have to help.”
Hamish reached for one of the controls, clearly in agreement, but Kilian grabbed their shoulders from his seat behind them. He spoke in a kind but firm tone. “Don’t get distracted.”
“But,” Connor and Hamish said in unison.
“Our friends are indeed facing danger, but they are prepared. Trust them just as they trust us. If they fail, people will die. If we fail, everything is lost. Keep that in mind. We cannot afford to waver, not now.”
Connor twisted in his seat, seething with fear and a driving desire to do something, anything. “They’re going to die. You realize that, don’t you?”
“Every battle is dangerous. If we delay, we might save a few lives for a few days, or even weeks, but might guarantee the death of everyone we know. Are you willing to take that chance?”
Connor wanted to smash something. He needed to help, but Kilian was right. He spun back around to face out the viewscreen at the tide of destruction rushing in its unstoppable wave toward Merkland and Verena. His hands shook with the need to unleash his affinities and he trembled with the barely suppressed urge to leap out of the Hawk and plunge down into that seething mass of monsters and rain destruction upon every monster that dared threaten the woman he loved.
But all he could do was watch, hating himself, hating Kilian, and most of all hating the Queen for forcing him to gamble with the lives of his loved ones.
Hamish blew out a breath and activated a sightstone set in the front panel of the Hawk. “Verena, are you seeing this?”
She gasped. “So many.”
Aifric suddenly cried, “Contact! We have flying monsters.”
She pointed a little bit to the left, and only then did Connor notice the dark, fast-moving clouds churning through the air in their direction. The entire horizon was blackened by their numbers. He’d been too distracted by the land and water swarms and had thought the dark clouds were a storm blowing in.
As Hamish magnified the view, Connor’s heart sank. The sky was filled with hundreds of flying monsters. Some of them looked like enormous pedras that made the great stone pedra that Kilian and Ilse had summoned so long ago seem like a baby. Others looked like giant eagles, while others were weird creations of nightmare.
Some looked made from leather like that strange inflatable-bag elemental monster that attacked Shona, while others sported long torsos with many limbs, capped in razor claws. Still others had multiple heads, with enormous, fang-filled jaws, many of which spurted flames.
Verena muttered a Grandurian curse that Connor had learned from her that winter. “I’m glad you spotted them. We weren’t looking into the air at all yet.”
“Do you want us to engage?” Hamish asked, hand again reaching for the controls.
Kilian started to speak but Verena said, “No. Get out of there. You have your own job to do. We’ll activate the shielding. The siege mechanical operators haven’t had nearly enough target practice. Looks like they’ll get all they can handle today.”
Connor appreciated her optimism, but she wasn’t fooling anyone. The city-wide shielding was not designed to stop a swarm like that.
“Roger. Disengaging,” Hamish said, but pivoted the Hawk in the air to face the distant swarm. Every missile packed under the Hawk’s stubby wings leaped away, driven by marble thrusters. Connor silently wished them on, but even if every one of the dozen missiles killed a monster, they wouldn’t make a dent in that swarm.
“Well done,” he told Hamish anyway. Seeing those missiles away helped ease some of his towering frustration at running while Verena and everyone inside Merkland fought for their lives.
Lady Briet spoke, connected to them through Rory’s line. “We have visual from the Albatross. These long vision viewports are incredible. We will begin targeting from here.”
“Thank you,” Verena said.
Connor had forgotten all about the Albatross, but knowing that they were already engaging helped a little.
“I approve the missiles,” Kilian said as Hamish banked the Hawk in a long turn to the west. “They won’t make much difference, but thank you for giving us that much.”
Hamish said, “Aifric, I hope your people understand the risk we’re taking today. If they don’t help us, they will regret it.”
She gripped his shoulder and said softly, “We’ll make them listen.”
Connor hoped she was right because he agreed with Hamish. As they accelerated toward the west, he turned in his seat and watched the swarms closing on Merkland with terrible fear eating at his heart and a heart-wrenching certainty growing in his mind.
He was leaving Verena behind to die.
37
Desperate Times Call for Desperate Measures
Verena rushed onto the great wall of Merkland, which was already crowded with soldiers. The mobilization was progressing as well as she had dared hope. Everyone knew the danger and understood that when the queen struck, they would receive the hammer blow of her fury. Rory, Ivor, Shona, and their officers had worked hard through the winter to prepare everyone to leap to their stations and duties without needing orders when the alarm was raised.
She pressed through the crowds of soldiers, heading toward the gatehouse over Army gate. The morning air was cool and calm, the sky bright. So different than the blizzard they had fought in the last time an army attacked Merkland. It was loud. Sergeants bellowed orders, soldiers called out statuses, and their armor creaked as they made last minute adjustments.
Sirens wailed across the city, rising and falling in the pattern that warned all citizens to get below ground. Forty-seven giant caverns had been excavated beneath the city and heavily fortified by Sentries and Sappers. They could each hold two thousand people and included food and water for two weeks, as well as Builder lightstones.
Once each filled with their allotment of civilians, Sentries would seal them shut, and a Builder team would activate every possible type of shielding available. They should remain impervious to all but relentless assaults by experienced Sentries. Verena dearly hoped the mindless summoned creatures would fail to sense them.
She planned to give the monsters plenty of more active targets to focus on.
Time was short, but Verena paused at the platform of one of the new Builder siege-defense weapons. The sight of the amazing invention gave her hope. It looked rather unassuming, j
ust a padded chair on a swivel base that allowed the Builder operator to rotate in any direction and angle back nearly prone.
The chair sat on a heavily reinforced steel cube. That’s where the magic happened. A basalt tube a full six feet long and six inches in diameter, reinforced with steel and quickened granite, rose from the cube. That was the launch tube, and it rotated with the operator seat, giving it an unparalleled field of fire.
Six smaller, squat tubes, three on each side, filled with ammunition, acted as feeders into the cube. Each round of ammunition looked like a cylinder with a rounded top. The ordinance was driven by a blast of compressed air.
It acted on similar principles to the speedslings, only with much bigger ammunition. The operator would set the triple-layered basalt acceleration drum contained within the cube rotating. Each round of ammunition would be inserted into the drum for initial acceleration. When it released up the acceleration ramp, driven by compressed air, its speed would double again. The launch tube, lined with basalt doubled the speed yet again so that the shells shot away at shocking speeds.
The weapons had only been delivered to Merkland a couple weeks prior, and Verena was glad the shipment had not been delayed. A young Builder named Marwin was already strapping in as the operator. Several assistants were working to load different types of ammunition into feeder tubes.
They were not nearly as destructive as the enormous elfonnel-busting Last Word bombs they had developed before the battle of Altkalen. These were smaller, designed with the intention of blasting max-tapped Boulders to splinters. Should work equally well on summoned creatures.
“Are you ready?” she asked.
Marwin nodded eagerly, looking nervous and excited at the same time. He patted the long delivery tube. “Show me a target.”
The ammunition fed into the acceleration cube included high explosive rounds, reinforced quickened granite penetrator rounds, and others. The mechanical could release thirty rounds per minute.
Verena gestured into the sky. “Your primary duty will be to defend against airborne attackers.”
“Really?” Marwin asked, his grin fading.
She nodded. “We have visual confirmation of a swarm of flying monsters. Those of you not facing directly south or over the river will be tasked with defending the city from aerial attack. I’m heading inside to activate the shield before we trigger the sentinel stands.”
Marwin gripped his controls. “We’ll be ready.”
They had all better be, because from what she’d seen of those swarms, they would be challenged to the breaking point. She concealed her worries, patted his shoulder, and rushed inside.
Behind her, she heard the low humming as Marwin activated the shielding around his mechanical. Those shields had been another recent breakthrough. They would protect the entire mechanical but leave a tiny gap where the ammunition could fire through.
Verena still struggled to make those selective gaps in shields. It was one of the few mechanicals that challenged her creative abilities. Hamish had figured out the concept, and he was the one who had created the shielding for all of those siege weapons. His mind worked in a twisted enough way that the mind-bending process seemed natural for him.
In the guardhouse she found a number of officers and technicians manning one of four banks of speakstones distributed around the wall. They were connected to officers all across the city, and could coordinate immediate information sharing. The room already buzzed with dozens of conversations. Most of the officers spoke calmly, but she could read their emotions, ranging from eager anticipation to barely suppressed fear.
They would hold. There was no other choice. Summoned creatures would show no mercy. The men and women stationed in the guardhouse waved, but Verena did not stop to chat. She descended a ladder through a hole in the floor to a reinforced bunker under the tower.
It consisted of a small, round chamber with a padded command chair on a swivel column in the center. Verena settled into the chair, which always seemed a little too comfortable for the deadly tasks it allowed her to perform. The arms of the chair included a series of controls. Small sculpted obsidian stones allowed her to connect to most of the mechanical defenses scattered around the city.
Verena scanned them with her Builder senses, feeling her confidence grow as she sensed all those mechanicals ready to come alive at her will. The sight of those swarms of monsters closing on the city had shaken her, but she settled into her battle calm. She knew autonomous summoned creatures could not think or feel emotions, but if they could they would soon regret invading during her watch.
First she activated a couple of remote sightstones, projecting their views onto the walls in front of her. Her command chair included tiny quartzite thrusters that allowed her to rotate so that she could use the entire curved wall for projecting viewscreens. The ones she activated gave her excellent views over the southern approaches to the city.
The monsters were still about two miles out, so those views were still secondary. Next she activated a piece of quartzite, connected to the most complex shielding array they had yet attempted. As soon as it activated, she rotated her chair and projected a view onto the blank wall behind her to watch it deploy.
Set in the top of the military command tower, that sightstone looked straight up. Hamish had thought it a silly place to put a sightstone, but Verena was glad now that she had insisted. The view showed her the sky above Merkland and clearly outlined the shimmering, amber glow of the shield she had just activated. The half dome was extending high above Merkland, stretching over the entire city.
Verena had depended upon shieldstones since the very first clash with Captain Rory’s Fast Rollers in Alasdair, but they were a weird invention. One of the quirks of quartzite was that it allowed her to compress air in very defined areas, somehow forming a physical barrier that even Petralists struggled to penetrate. Shieldstones had saved her life more than once.
Now hopefully they could help save the city.
The enormous Merkland shield was powered by a complex array of linked quartzite, anchored to more quartzite pieces set just inside the walls. All together, they spread a softly glowing dome of protection over the entire city, anchored to the inside edges of the walls. That allowed the soldiers and Petralists to fight without getting stuck inside the shield.
They had debated if they should extend the shielding to the outer edge of the walls, but had finally decided that it made more sense to shield the inner city but not interfere with the work of the Petralists. She began to wonder if that had been such a good idea, but it was too late to change it now.
While Verena monitored the huge shield, she activated secondary shields that made up part of the Overrun Directive. Angled shields appeared a dozen feet above the walls, anchored to each watchtower, spreading canopies of protection a hundred feet in both directions. They would help a little against aerial attack, but not block the Petralists’ abilities to respond. Those shields were mobile so if the wall was overrun, soldiers could carry with them the quartzite powering each section as they retreated to secondary fighting locations.
Even a few months ago, she would have scoffed at the idea of shielding an entire city, but they’d made so many breakthroughs that things that had seemed beyond miraculous were becoming reality. It was a marvelous time to be alive and to be a Builder.
Today she would need every trick, every ounce of power she could muster to protect her people from harm.
Once Verena confirmed the shield was up and active, she rotated her chair back around to the front wall and activated a speakstone linked to Ivor, and another one to Anton.
“Status?” she asked.
Ivor answered immediately, his tone tense, his words clipped. “Kind of busy. Water-born swarm has closed to almost the one mile mark. I’m doing everything I can, but there are so many of them, and they’ve got some kind of shielding along the front edge that makes it hard to target them.”
“I’ve got a squad of six more Spitters movi
ng downriver to reinforce you.”
“Thanks. We’re going to need all the help we can get.” He hesitated, then added, “Unless I’m sensing this all wrong, it seems the queen created the water-bound summoned within bodies of water.”
“Can she do that?” Verena asked, surprised, and really not happy about that. They couldn’t deal with more surprises at the moment.
“We know it’s possible to house the elements within different types of bodies. I just hadn’t considered housing water-bound within water. It’s going to make killing them a lot harder.”
Verena muttered a curse as Anton spoke, his deep voice calm as always. “The mountain shakes under the mindless violence of the avalanche, but the rough stone is only smoothed by the passage of the waters.”
“I take it you’re still fighting them too,” she said, allowing a little smile of relief. She had worried Anton would do something foolish or be swarmed under and destroyed by those monsters.
“The bonfire may pose less risk than a forest fire, but the hand thrust into its flames is burned just as severely,” he replied, his tone tenser than usual.
“So I’m assuming that means you killed a bunch of them, but they still pose a dire threat.” She loved Anton, but part of her wanted to reach through that speakstone and slap him.
The inventor part of her immediately started wondering if it was possible to invent a slapstone. She vowed never to voice that idea anywhere in Hamish’s company.
“Sculpted scone,” Anton responded, and actually sounded like he was smiling.
Verena groaned. “We got rid of that ridiculous codeword, you know?”
“Hamish informed me how much you loved it.”
Ivor laughed and said, “If you can joke a time like this, things are either not as bad as I feared or they’re so bad that I might as well stop worrying because we’re all going to die.”
