A pair of hulking shapes rose from the water to either side of the causeway, and began crawling onto land. Bone golems, of a different design than the others. Smaller shapes scrambled up their backs, undead soldiers using them as ladders.
Elin was caught right between them.
“Damn it, no!”
I slammed a force push into one of the golems that sent it flying backward, skipping twice on the surface of the harbor before sinking forty feet offshore. But the other one was swinging one of those long, bony blade limbs at Elin, and she seemed to be paralyzed with fear.
Then Cerise appeared next to her, and tackled her. The giant weapon passed harmlessly over their heads, and I breathed a sigh of relief. If there was anyone I could trust to get my little scholar to safety, it was Cerise.
I cut down a couple of the undead marines with a force blade, delaying them long enough for a handful of soldiers with force blades and flamers to assemble to repel the attack. One of the skimmers opened fire on the remaining golem while I was engaged, blowing gaping holes through the lumbering construct. But another pair of golems were already starting to emerge from the water.
A rain of arrows began to fall around me. The archers must be firing over the surrounding buildings from several blocks away, and the unaimed projectiles mostly landed in the street or bounced off the armored tops of the skimmers. Even those that hit didn’t have the force to penetrate my men’s hauberks after their long flight, but here and there one found exposed flesh to sink into.
I heard Grinder’s howl, and the golem on the causeway collapsed. A wall of water appeared from nowhere to sweep a clump of undead back into the harbor, and then our line of retreat was clear again.
I joined the girls with a single force-enhanced leap, and hugged them both. “Everyone alright?”
“Not a scratch!” Cerise replied.
“Yes. Sorry for panicking like that. I’m not used to battles,” Elin admitted sheepishly.
“It’s alright, Elin. You’re a healer, not a warrior.”
I took a moment to look around. Marcus had his men in motion now, moving back towards the causeway. Two skimmers and half the infantry were beating back the undead marines, while the rest poured fire into the mist that was now creeping down both streets towards their position. But retreating under fire is always a risky evolution, and this unit had far too many recent recruits. Maybe they could pull it off on their own, as long as there were no more surprises. But I wasn’t going to bet on it.
“Change of plans. Elin, stick with Cerise and back her up. Cerise, I need you to take Corinna’s squad and clear a path back to the keep. Then hold the gate until everyone is inside. I’ll be with the rearguard.”
“You got it, boss.”
The dryads caught up with me then, which was good timing. There was already motion in the water again, as the undead marines readied for another assault. We needed some serious firepower at the gates quick, or they could end up breaking into the keep.
I made my way back through our lines, passing a skimmer to rejoin Marcus.
“The girls are clearing the causeway,” I told him.
“Good. Can you clear out that fog, sir? It’s getting uncomfortably close now, and we’ve no idea what it might be hiding.”
“No problem.”
I bounded atop the last skimmer, which was grounded in front of the causeway. I didn’t have any great insight into air or water magic, but I could easily break the spell that was creating the fog. That didn’t immediately disperse it, but it did make it stop creeping towards us.
A few seconds later a row of tall shapes emerged from the fog. At first glance it looked like a moving wall of bone creeping slowly down the street towards us, but with a closer look I saw that it was actually three separate sections mounted on wheels. They all looked a bit chewed up from the gunfire that was still pouring into them, but the barriers were thick enough to protect the mass of armored troops behind them.
I opened up with my revolver, firing explosive rounds into the mobile walls. The first few shots blew them to pieces, and tore a big hole in the front of the enemy formation. Then I switched aim to the other street, giving the same treatment to the other enemy force.
Unfortunately the losses failed to discourage them. Instead a horn sounded, and both groups leveled their spears and charged our position with a bloodthirsty roar.
They were barely thirty yards away, and there were only a dozen men still on the firing line. Arrows were still falling all around us, and now more accurate shots began to rain down from the windows of nearby buildings. The skimmer’s cannon opened up, but even that wasn’t going to be enough. There were too many of them.
I ran forward and jumped off the skimmer, landing next to Sergeant Thomas where he was calling out volleys.
“Fall back to the causeway!” I shouted. “I’ll hold them off.”
I sent my earth talisman off to the right, where it quickly grew into a stone wall that blocked the street on the right. At the same time I switched to bouncer rounds, and started firing down the street to the left again. One round per second was a lower rate of fire than I would have liked for these circumstances, but from my new position each of the magical grenades cut a swath deep into the packed ranks of enemy troops.
There were too many to kill, but it was enough to stall their advance. The soldiers retreated with alacrity, piling into the skimmer and slamming the doors. The cannon fell silent, and then the heavy vehicle lifted and began to inch back onto the causeway.
I held down the trigger, and poured fire into the enemy. Their archers began to target me, but the heavy arrows just bounced off my shield. A few of them exploded into balls of flame or bursts of acid, but even that barely registered. My earth talisman was taking more of a beating, but its magical reinforcement was enough to protect it from anything a mass of spearmen could do.
A bolt of green energy speared down from a rooftop, passing through my shield to splash off my curse barrier. I switched to explosive rounds and returned fire, blowing the top of the building apart and setting it on fire with half a dozen shots. But by then the troops I’d been shooting up were getting uncomfortably close, and the other army had started to scale my wall. It was time to go.
I retreated onto the causeway, calling back my earth talisman and shrinking it into a ball. Just in time, too, as a fresh group of golems heaved themselves out of the water next to me.
I kept shooting, cursing under my breath and wishing I hadn’t left Grinder with Cerise. I jumped over one golem, knocked another back into the water with a force push, landed among a group of marines and spent a few precious seconds cutting them apart before bolting again. There were bullets whizzing through the air around me now, and a cannon fired somewhere nearby.
I broke free of the enemy ambush attempt and bounded down the causeway, catching up with the last skimmer in a few long jumps. Some idiot shot me, but the bullet bounced off my shield as easily as the enemy arrows had. I ignored it, jumping onto the skimmer next to the gunner’s position.
“Concentrate on the golems,” I told him, and opened fire again. Back to bouncer rounds, thinning out the ranks of the enemy and covering the stones of the causeway with their mangled remains.
They kept coming, their numbers seemingly endless. Halfway down the causeway I glanced back to find that the first skimmer was just passing through the gate, with a group of infantry anxiously waiting behind it. We slowed, and I realized that getting inside and closing the gates before the enemy mobbed us wasn’t going to happen. I’d made the gates thick to ensure nothing could break them, but that also made them too heavy to move quickly.
Well, maybe some good would come of that night I’d spent being paranoid. I kept firing down the causeway, but my concentration went to the control ring I wore. In addition to my earth talisman, it was linked to all the other contingencies I’d set up.
As the skimmer I was riding approached the gates I set of the mine at the far end of the causeway. It
was just a rock with an enchantment on it, but now that enchantment conjured five hundred pounds of molten nickel-iron at the pressure of the Earth’s core.
The explosion was so loud I was momentarily deafened even at this distance. A fountain of flame and debris rose high into the night, and the shock wave knocked the whole army off their feet. The skimmer lurched, and slammed into the side of the open gateway.
I waited until the driver recovered and maneuvered it inside, and then jumped to the ground and set off the second mine. This one was forty feet closer, and the blast was half as big. Then the smaller mines along the rest of the causeway, at a mere forty pounds each. They looked tiny in comparison, but they were more than enough to reduce the rest of the enemy army to a mass of broken bodies.
We pushed the gates closed, and I set the heavy bars into place with my force magic.
All around me the men slumped in relief, but it wasn’t over yet. Give the enemy twenty minutes of peace and they’d offload another army as big as the one we’d just destroyed. And another after that, and then another, until Kozalin was buried in undead. I wasn’t sure how many troops Hecate had available for this attack, but if the mythology was accurate every warrior who didn’t die in battle was hers.
Most soldiers die of disease and exposure, or survive their campaigns and die a peaceful death years later. For that matter, wouldn’t the civilians all be hers to claim as well? Practically the entire population of Europe, then. For hundreds of years, possibly thousands in the North.
Yeah, she wasn’t going to run out of soldiers.
I found Marcus at Elin’s impromptu medical station, where she was busily fixing the hearing of everyone else who’d been too close to the gates when I set off those big explosions. She frowned at me, but didn’t complain.
“What now, sir?” Marcus asked.
“Get your men positioned to help defend the island,” I told him. “We need enough firepower on the walls to stop any attempt to get the gates open, and a reaction team here with the skimmers that we can send to take care of anything unexpected that happens. I’m going to deal with those ships.”
“How are we going to do that?” Cerise asked eagerly.
“Come give me a hand, and I’ll show you.”
I led her through the keep and out onto the island, where crowds of refugees were tending livestock and shifting loads of boxes and barrels into the extra living quarters I’d constructed a few days ago. Apparently some of my neighbors had found time to strip their cupboards of supplies before fleeing from the fighting. Well, that would certainly make the next week or two easier on them.
Beyond that was the military barracks, a firing range, and the little building where I’d done some of my more hazardous enchantment work. An enchantment factory to make explosives definitely qualified as that, so I’d left it out here instead of storing it in the tower.
“Lord wizard!” A nymph called, rushing over from the nearest entrance to the dryad habitat. She was armored in wood like Corinna, but carried a staff instead of a spear or bow.
“Yes?”
“Demetrios wanted me to warn you, milord. There’s something huge lurking in the river. It’s invisible from above water, but we’ve been spreading a divination ward into the water and the creature has brushed up against it a few times. It’s far bigger than a ship, milord. Probably a kraken, or a sea serpent.”
“Narfing, probably,” I mused. Could he reach the top of my walls, forty feet above the river? Maybe. But there would be plenty of time to see him coming, and I didn’t think he’d enjoy getting shot up with my new gun. That was a manageable problem, as long as we didn’t go out on the river.
“Thanks for the warning. Pass the word to everyone on the walls to keep an eye open. It might be able to reach them if they’re careless, but the towers and sentry posts should all be too sturdy to smash open. If it attacks have everyone retreat indoors and wait for me to deal with it.”
“Yes, milord.” She turned and sprinted back towards the habitat.
I shook my head. “We definitely need radios. One more thing to worry about later, I guess.”
“Yeah, I’ll ask what you’re talking about after the fight is over,” Cerise agreed. “So what do we need from here?”
I opened a doorway into the blank stone wall of the building, and walked inside. The enchantment factory was a two hundred pound block of stone, so I used force magic to lift it instead of my hands. That left the tube and base plate, which I pointed out to Cerise.
“Can you carry that to the wall for me? It weighs more than you do, but you’ve got that super strength thing going for you.”
She lifted the tube easily, and set it on her shoulder. The base plate she picked up one-handed, and held like a schoolgirl with an armload of books. Damn, she was even stronger now.
“I’m getting a little tired, but this is no problem. What is it? It looks kind of like a gun, only the barrel is way too big. If it’s like the cannons it would kick hard enough to kill anyone behind it when it fires.”
I set out jogging towards the wall. “You’ve got that right. I actually started out working on a weapon called a howitzer, which is basically a big cannon that fires shells in a high arc instead of a flat trajectory. They can have incredible range, but I realized pretty quickly that it would take too much work to solve all the problems. Managing the recoil would be complicated, and we’d need forward observers and long-distance communication magic and a bunch of other stuff I don’t have time to figure out. Not to mention that it would be overkill.”
“Forward observers?” She said curiously. “Wait, is that like a strategic curse projection? You assemble a curse at your base, and then make it manifest at a targeting beacon miles away?”
Note to self: the wizards in this world really know their stuff. Stop underestimating them.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Different mechanism, but the same basic concept.”
She grinned, and trotted up the stairs in front of me. “That would be awesome. But you’re right, that wouldn’t help us here. The ships are too heavily warded, and besides they’re close enough to see. If the cannons on the skimmers fired exploding shells like your gun they’d probably be enough for this.”
“Assuming Narfing didn’t pop up and smash them into the river the moment they opened fire,” I agreed. “I’ll have to take care of that problem before we do anything else.”
We reached the top of the wall, and I paused for a moment to pick a good spot to set up. Since it was a good thirty feet thick we didn’t have to be right at the edge, just close enough that we still had a view of the far side of the harbor.
I set down the enchantment factory, and started it up.
“Can you handle these for me?” I asked as the first shell materialized. “Just stack them on their sides, like this. But be careful not to drop one. I wasn’t finished working out all the safety features on these things, and we really don’t want to set one off by accident.”
“Big boom?” Cerise asked.
“Big enough that we might not survive it,” I said seriously.
She licked her lips. “I can’t wait to see this thing in action.”
I conjured up a force wall to protect our position, and some long force spikes projecting up and out where they’d give the sea serpent a really bad day if he tried to attack us. Then I set up the mortar, and angled the tube almost all the way up. I’d never fired one of these things myself, and my back of the envelope calculations about how it should perform barely qualified as a wild-ass guess. Better to drop my ranging shots on the harbor than the Iron Citadel.
The situation out on the docks was already deteriorating again. Two forces of golems were fighting each other among the burning buildings at the far end of the district, with flashes of magic occasionally erupting from the melee. Another force was engaged with an army of regular troops near my own citadel, with archers and several catapults lending support. Hel’s forces had apparently won the fight for the gate into th
e Temple District already, and troops were marching through it in a steady stream.
That wasn’t counting the three or four thousand undead infantry who had begun to methodically smash open the district’s buildings and slaughter their inhabitants. In the distance I could make out a large group besieging one of the refugee shelters I’d built, battering futilely at its iron doors with a ram made of bone. But most of the buildings weren’t so sturdy, and I could barely guess how many civilians would be dead before dawn at this rate.
More people I couldn’t save. How many senseless deaths would I have to witness before this war was over? I shook my head, and turned back to the mortar. This had better work, or we were all going to end up regretting my decision to refuse Mara’s offer.
I grabbed a shell off the neat stack Cerise was accumulating, and dropped it down the tube. Mortar rounds are subsonic, so there was no crack as the weapon fired. Just a soft whoosh of displaced air.
“That didn’t look like much,” Cerise observed.
“Wait for it,” I told her.
A geyser of water erupted from the river, maybe a third of the way to the enemy ships and well off to the left. I lowered the elevation a bit, and dropped in another round. This one landed halfway there.
“Are they out of range?” Cerise asked.
“Hardly. I’m just taking my time, and trying not to overshoot and blow up part of the city.”
Another adjustment, and the next round was only a couple hundred yards short. It was still landing a good way off to the left as well, but that’s what the other aiming screw was for. I made another adjustment, still wishing I had some actual experience with this.
A huge shape rose from the river not far from where the last shell had landed, barely visible in the light of the burning buildings. It sank beneath the surface again almost immediately, and I fired the next round.
This one was a little over. But there was more activity around the ships, now. An eerie green glow from beneath the water hinted at activity there, and invisible flashes of magic surged out over the harbor.
“Hey, look!” Cerise said. “They haven’t figured it out. They think we’re down there somewhere. We don’t have to come out and fight, dumbasses. We’re going to blow you up from all the way over here!”
Black Coven (Daniel Black Book 2) Page 40
