The Scarab Path

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  It occurred to Che now that probably more than one tomb was missing its effigy, but she felt with certainty that she could put a name to the imperious woman that stood before her. The words welled up in her mind, and she mouthed them: ‘Elysiath Neptellian, Lady of the Bright Water, She whose Word Breaks all Bonds, Princess of the Thousand.’

  Accius made an animal sound in his throat and raised his crossbow. The woman extended a commanding hand, with a faint smile on her lips.

  The world flew apart.

  Forty-One

  The Scorpions had been massing since before dawn, forming up into great clattering, complaining companies along the western bank. The eastern sky barely showed the first grey signs of light as they made their first sortie. It was a rabble. Totho had already seen enough to know that there was a hierarchy of usefulness within the enemy ranks. These were the losers, first to be cast away and first to die. They came in a great screaming horde, and if they possessed any appreciation of their place in the world, Totho could not perceive it.

  If we could bottle that mad fervour, he thought, then we could sell it for a fortune to any general or tyrant you’d care to name.

  The archers took their places and drew back their bowstrings. The poor light would work against their aim, and the Scorpion charge was uneven, the faster outstripping the slower and leaving gaps for arrows to fall into. Sometimes poor discipline offered its own tactical value.

  Four dozen strings sang almost as one. The militia, denied any use for its spear detachments, had packed the barricade with bowmen, shoulder to shoulder. So far they had been the blade that had killed score upon score of the invaders, whilst the Royal Guard, with their armour and spears, had been the shield to fend off the enemy strike. The Guard had died steadily throughout yesterday’s fight, their numbers already savagely depleted from the disastrous field battle. From the way they stood firm, Totho guessed they would do so until the last of them fell.

  He spared his snapbow for now, letting the Khanaphir archers do their work. A solid volley hammered into the howling advance just before it engaged, and what reached the Royal Guard was pitiful, thrown back into the arrowstorm without a single loss to the defenders. The very sight of Amnon seemed to turn the Scorpions away.

  ‘More coming!’ Tirado shouted down. ‘Shields!’

  The archers had become old hands at arcing their shots over the curve of the bridge to fall blindly amongst the packed enemy advance. This time there were fewer cries of pain, more sounds of arrows thudding in wood. The Many of Nem were being taught battle tactics the painful way, but they were learning.

  The advance was slower now, warriors not used to bearing shields were getting in each other’s way. The arrows still found the odd mark, and an injured or dying man with a three-foot shield became a hazard to all around him. Teuthete and her people began loosing their own shafts, the bone and stone heads cracking stolen shields wherever they landed, or clipping the rims to punch home into faces or legs behind them. Totho sighed and worked the snapbow handle, charging pressure. He loosed all five shots at once in a narrow arc, forming a fist that smashed the shield-wall in as his bolts holed shields and flesh and barely slowed. He ducked to recharge, the archers all around letting fly so that each shield soon grew heavy and unwieldy with arrows. Men were running from the construction works on the east bank with fresh quivers. Khanaphes seemed to have an endless supply of arrows.

  If we had a snapbow that could fire a bolt every few seconds, and it had a magazine of hundreds, Totho thought, I could hold this bridge alone … or with one man to feed in the bolts. I should mention it to Drephos.

  ‘Crossbows!’ Tirado called out, his high-pitched voice clear over the sounds of battle. The Scorpions in the second rank had brought up bows and levelled them over the shoulders of their comrades. The men behind them had shields up over their heads to protect them, a crude imitation of Ant-kinden tactics. ‘Crossbows!’ Tirado yelled again.

  The Royal Guard had braced themselves behind their shields, but the heavy crossbows the Scorpions had been given were powerful enough to penetrate straight through half the time. They could not give up the breach. Tirado could shout at them all he liked.

  Totho remained down until he heard the massed clack of two score crossbows. He saw men and women hurled back from the breach, shot through. Others stumbled, taken through the leg, or simply because of the massive impact on their shields. Amnon was crying for them to hold, and the archers kept aiming down for that elusive gap between shield-lines that the crossbowmen were shooting through.

  Totho popped up and struck down another handful of shieldmen, giving the archers a clear shot at the men behind. The Scorpions were already surging forward, armoured warriors pressing from behind, the crossbowmen separating to let them through. Amnon cried to hold again, and then the lines clashed together. Greatsword and halberd battered against Khanaphir shields, as the Scorpion finest strove to smash their way through the weakened line with main force. Amnon himself was unmovable. Their strokes slid off his sculpted armour, deflected from his shield. He fought with his spear until the shaft splintered, and then he hacked at them with his sword.

  To the right of him the line wavered. A huge Scorpion had leapt up to the barricade, hurling back two of the Guard, laying about him with a double-handed axe. Teuthete put an arrow between his neck and shoulder, shooting almost vertically down into him, but there were another three Scorpions taking his place, eager to force that one breach that would undo the defenders.

  They met a wall of aviation-grade steel as Meyr rammed them with his shield. With all the thunderous momentum he could muster, he flung all three Scorpions back onto the blades of their fellows. The force of his charge took him beyond the barricade, momentarily in the midst of his enemies. He swung at them with a great bronze-reinforced club that had been a scaffolding bar only two hours before. As the enemy hacked at his mail, he hurled them left and right with monstrous blows, making even the burly Scorpions look like children. Amnon was shouting for him to get back in line and the Scorpions were all about him, halberd-blades seeking his throat, his armpits, any gap in his mail. Meyr finally stepped back, finding the barricade’s edge by concentration and memory, and then retreating behind the reformed line of Royal Guard.

  There was no shortage of the Scorpions, however. They were still packed solid all the way to the western shore, with no sign that they would ever break off.

  ‘Tirado!’ Totho ordered. ‘Send for the Iteration!’

  The Fly-kinden saluted, and darted off down the river. The archers were drawing and loosing as fast as they could, sending their shafts towards every unprotected piece of Scorpion skin they could see. Still Amnon held firm in the midst of the Royal Guard’s overlapping shields as the Scorpions hurled themselves onto the bloody points of the Khanaphir spears. Now Meyr was fighting from behind the line, using his height and reach to swat any Scorpion that gained a foothold on the barricade. At any moment it seemed that the Scorpions must lose their fervour, that the attack would ebb away in a flurry of final arrows, but still they pressed and pressed. The corpses were mounting up and they used them as stepping stones up to the Khanaphir shields. A score of the Guard had fallen and been replaced, and the numbers of waiting reinforcements were now getting sparse. Totho saw old Kham, Amnon’s cousin, jerk backwards with a huge gash splitting halfway into his chest, dragging the Scorpion sword from its wielder’s clawed hands as he fell.

  On board the Iteration they had kept the engines turning over, waiting for the call. In truth Corcoran had hoped that it would be noon before the ship’s intervention was needed, but Tirado dropped down on him before the sun was clear of the horizon.

  ‘Already?’ the Solarnese demanded.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Tirado confirmed. ‘Absolutely yes.’ He was in the air a moment later, zigzagging back towards the embattled bridge.

  Corcoran cursed, thinking, It isn’t our city, for the thousandth time. He shouted the orders, though. They had learned a
lot from the Empire, those in the Iron Glove. If you wanted to do well, you did what you were told. Totho’s got a plan. Totho’s got a plan. He repeated it to himself over and over, ignoring the way it sounded hollower each time.

  They cast off, and the Fourth Iteration’s engines rumbled them towards the bridge. Its approach would not have gone unmarked by the enemy, and even now they would be wheeling out the leadshotters, not to be caught by surprise as they had been the last time.

  ‘Get the smallshotters to the rail!’ Corcoran called. ‘Once we’re in range I want every damn one to go off. Cut them a new road back to the Nem: grapeshot and scrapshot all weapons.’

  He took out his glass and unfolded it to its full length, raking the western shore for the enemy’s disposition. Sure enough, there was a roil of activity there, but the mass of Scorpions pushing to take their place on the bridge was so dense that the crew of the Iteration could slaughter them blindfold. They’ve stepped it up today, Corcoran realized. It was barely dawn, and yet the Scorpions were already throwing everything into the fray.

  He spied the smoke from the first leadshotter before he heard the sound, clutching at the rail in sudden fear. The shot went short and wide, though, so far off that it was useless even for ranging. That’s it lads, you go and waste your powder. His own people knew the limits of their weapons. They had their steel lighters ready, carefully withholding their fire until their weapons were well into range.

  That first shot from the shore triggered a scatter of copycats, each of them falling short and astern as they failed to take the Iteration’s cruising into account. It came to Corcoran that the Scorpions would have no real experience of shooting at a moving target and that leadshotters, even at their best, were not designed for it.

  He looked upriver, where there was one obvious impediment to making a strafing pass against the Scorpions. He ran astern to his helmsman, a Chasme halfbreed called Hakkon, mentally trying to size up the Iteration with the bridge’s arches.

  ‘Can we get past the bridge, if we wanted to?’ he asked. There was another scatter of leadshot, and he heard the whoosh of water as the misplaced barrage broke up nothing but the river.

  Hakkon tugged at his chin. ‘Probably,’ was all he would say. ‘Let me get closer to see.’ The bridge had plainly been built to stop large vessels passing upriver, but for the Khanaphir a large ship had a mast and a sail. The Iteration made a sleek, low profile in the water.

  ‘Close to range!’ one of his men called, just as another leadshot raised a great spire of water astern, near enough to rock them.

  ‘Keep moving!’ Corcoran shouted. ‘Just keep moving!’ He ran forward again. There was a constant sporadic pounding from the Scorpion engines now, one or other of them hurling metal every few minutes. A scatter of optimistic crossbowmen were loosing at them, standing knee-deep in the shallows. One of the bolts got as near as to rattle off the hull.

  Corcoran watched the Scorpion masses still pushing for the bridge. There was a light rain of bodies dropping from where the fighting was, Scorpions hurled back by the Khanaphir or pushed off by their own side.

  ‘Now!’

  This time he remembered to hold on, as every smallshotter detonated at once. The fistfuls of stone and metal shot scythed into the nearest Scorpions, killing dozens where they stood.

  ‘Don’t slow down!’ Corcoran shouted. ‘Under the bridge! Under the bridge!’ The arches looked smaller than he had gauged. If I’m wrong about this, we’ll look like fools … and then we’ll die. A lucky shot from the Scorpion artillery clipped across the deck, smashing the rail to both port and starboard in a hail of splinters. The smallshotters were being reloaded with an artificer’s care, upended to receive the shot and wadding, and then turned down again for the little pot that was the firepowder charge. A few crossbow bolts clattered from the hull, and one of Corcoran’s men swore as one dug into his arm, shallow enough to sag straight out again.

  The swiftest of them managed a second messy shot, loosing back at the Scorpions, and then the shadow of the bridge covered them, ancient stones closing in around them and gliding by on both sides, close enough to touch.

  ‘Keep reloading!’ Corcoran told them, his voice echoing back down the length of the massive archway. ‘They’ll be there on the other side.’

  But their leadshotters won’t, he realized. Almost all the Scorpion artillery had been brought to the south of the bridge, to catch the Iteration. Until the Scorpions moved their cumbersome weapons back, the ship could sit still in the water and pulverize Scorpions. Corcoran grinned at the simplicity of it.

  The boat’s sides scraped against stone, but the crew were fending off the bridge with poles and Hakkon had a steady hand. Now they emerged into the dawning daylight, levelling their smallshotters at a surprised Scorpion army.

  Totho crouched behind the barricade again, sliding another magazine into his snapbow. Field-testing, they call this. He would need to give the weapon some decent care tonight, as it had seen more action this last day than any other score of snapbows anywhere in the world. Yes, tonight. Hold on to that thought.

  He had heard the thunder of the Iteration’s rail-engines, but the Scorpions were still not slackening off. Their crossbowmen were killing archers from behind their fence of shields, while their warriors were still locked man to man with Amnon’s Guard. When Totho had last looked at them, the defenders of Khanaphes had been awash with blood, not one of them without some wound, except Amnon himself, and yet not one giving ground.

  He levered himself up cautiously. With a snapbow, he could crouch low, as the Khanaphir archers could not. He had already felt one crossbow bolt bound painfully from his helm, leaving a dent that pressed against his head every time he moved it.

  ‘Fliers!’ Tirado shouted. ‘Look to the sky! Fliers!’

  Fliers? Scorpions don’t fly. For a moment Totho was too surprised to do the obvious thing and look up. Then he saw the Wasps coming in, only a handful of them, but he caught sight of what their lead man was holding.

  ‘Shoot them down!’ he called out, at the top of his voice. ‘Kill the Wasps! Kill the airborne!’

  He loosed his own shot, but against a swift-flying target it flew hopelessly wide. The other Khanaphir simply had not responded. Their world scarcely admitted an ‘airborne’ aspect to war. They were busy killing Scorpions on the ground.

  Totho shot a second bolt, missed again, and then threw himself off the barricade, dragging the nearest archer with him.

  The first Wasp grenade was off target, shattering on the bridge’s edge in a sudden flash of fire that startled many but harmed nobody. The second dropped neatly into the massed archers close to where Totho had just been.

  It was a simple clay pot with a cloth fuse, but someone had patiently packed it with nails and stones and a solid charge of firepowder stolen from the leadshotters. The simplicity of the device was an affront to artifice: clumsy, inaccurate and unreliable.

  On this occasion, simplicity won out. Totho saw the explosion erupt amid the archers, shredding men and women to pieces so that their flesh rained down on friend and foe alike, hurling others off their feet to tumble down on the stones or plummet into the water. A section of the wooden battlement the size of two men was blown off into the Scorpion crossbows, leaving a broad space of the archers’ platform unprotected. Totho covered his eye-slit as a rain of splinters and metal and pieces of bone rattled against his armour.

  Another grenade went past, exploding on the bridge behind him as the thrower miscalculated his own momentum. A firepot of oil landed amongst the archers on the other side, in a shocking gout of flame. Totho raised his snapbow, remembering the brutal chaos of the siege of Tark, where Wasp airborne had been thick in the sky. He caught one of the men turning, missed twice and hit with his last shot, the bolt tearing through the man’s thigh. The Wasp spun out of the air and dropped down past the bridge’s side.

  Then he heard the Iteration’s smallshotters again, but this time to the north of th
e bridge. A shudder rippled through the Scorpion ranks, and the crack and boom of the ship’s weapons sounded again and again, shot overlapping shot in their eagerness. Despite the damage done by the grenades, the Scorpion tide began to ebb. The archers that remained were not letting up, loosing arrow after arrow even as parts of their barricade burned.

  At last, their rear ranks continually raked by the Iteration’s insistent fusillade, the Scorpions drew back.

  They had a pack of carpenters on the barricades trying to repair the damage that the grenades had done, hammering new wood into place frantically, as the Scorpion horde reordered itself for its second charge.

  ‘We can’t last another one of those assaults,’ Amnon said, finally down from the breach after hours of holding the line. He had his helm off and his face was streaked with sweat, darkly bruised about one eye where an axe had glanced from his helmet.

  ‘Meyr, how many Wasps did you see amongst the Scorpions, back in the Nem?’ Totho asked.

  The Mole Cricket hunched close. ‘Two dozen, three, somewhere around that number.’

  ‘We were lucky,’ Totho decided. Amnon just raised an eyebrow, thinking no doubt of all the archers who had burned or been blown apart by just a few hurled missiles. Totho shook his head. ‘Believe me, we could have lost it all, right then, except the men who came over were Slave Corps. The Empire’s Engineering Corps has trained grenadier squads and they’d have made more of a mess than we could hope to clean up. The Scorpion commander’s making use of what they’ve got, but it’s makeshift. Most of what they threw at us went wide, even into the river.’