Then the twin rotary piercers, set lower down, opened up — or at least one of them did, the other failing to spin into life at all, a casualty of the ramming. Stenwold watched half the Vekken formation falling, the enemy’s bolts punching through shields and mail and men, chewing through their close-knit ranks like a scythe through corn. The Ants were on the move immediately, though, rushing at the machine, more of them falling to its built-in snapbows, and more still to the Wasp infantry who were pushing in at either side of the Sentinel, desperate to force the breach. Then the Sentinel itself was stepping forwards, unstoppable, inexorable, becoming both shield and hammer of the Imperial army. Snapbow bolts rattled and danced off its carapace, and the Vekken soldiers, trying to climb it and lever apart its plates with all the strength their Art gave them, were picked off without accomplishing anything, until even they were falling back, those of them that could.
Elder Padstock was calling for her soldiers to hold firm, and they held, but all Stenwold could wonder, as he chambered another bolt, was, For how long?
‘We used to do this going ship to ship, you know?’ Laszlo had explained. ‘Inapt archers, Apt toys, you see? Our artificer, Despard, she came up with a plan for putting these fellows just where we wanted them — get a bowman in the rigging and you can shoot the things onto the enemy’s deck or at his mast or whatever.’
As she listened to him, Castre Gorenn heard the usual sort of nonsense babble that people in Collegium spoke, most of which made no sense to her whatsoever. She had seen how the little artificer’s stones in his bag blazed into fire when they struck things, and then he had shown her how, with a little application, they could be tied to an arrow. She would not have listened even that far, save that the little man actually possessed a bow of his own, for all that it was a pitiful piece of work compared to hers.
‘Now, I’m going to prime this for you, so you be careful: put the arrow to the string, and don’t, whatever you do, knock it against anything. We want it to go bang at their end, not ours.’
Laszlo did something to the unwieldy weight that was encumbering the end of her arrow, and then something similar to his own.
‘Now we go hunting, right?’ He grinned at her, and she returned the smile, because hunting was something she did understand.
The Fly-kinden’s wings flashed, and he dropped off the wall on the city side, and she followed suit, taking exaggerated care with the deadly burden she had nocked.
Above them, the Light Airborne were beginning to return to the wall-top, not rushing it now, but shooting down with sting and snapbow, trading shot with the Company soldiers. Gorenn twitched to go back and kill more of them, but the Antspider had told her to help Laszlo and, although she resented the order, she did as she was told.
And then they dropped into the shadow of the gateway and saw the monster that was advancing through it, segment by segment, clambering over the uneven wreckage of the gate braces, and with Imperial soldiers on either side. The defenders — Maker’s Own Company and a ragged ghost of the Vekken detachment — were gradually giving ground, shooting at the soldiers but powerless to halt the terrible machine.
For a moment, Laszlo hesitated, but then he went diving in, skimming the arched ceiling of the gateway, darting close even as the Wasps realized he was there. She saw his arrow leave the string, shooting back towards the front of the Sentinel, aiming between its armour plates, and the flash and bang of the grenade fooled her into thinking he had accomplished something. The machine still ground on, though, and she tried her own shot, striking the Sentinel low down, cutting the feet from a Wasp soldier and flaring bright about the front leg of the advancing automotive. But that armour, too, seemed to be proof against Laszlo’s weaponry, and she saw nothing worse than some charring and scratches. The missile had flown like a bloated autumn beetle, almost dropping from the string, and achieving a range of a few yards at best with no real accuracy.
The two of them dropped back behind the defenders, and a moment later she saw the circular hatch in the machine’s front sliding open. A colossal gout of flame and noise belched forth from it, hurling some projectile faster than her eye could follow. It smashed against the already battered front wall of a house across the way, bringing the entire building down, including with it the soldiers who had been stationed on its roof.
Laszlo had fitted another bulbous weapon to one of his stubby little shafts, but she had seen how close he had gone to get his arrow off, and how only the surprise of the Wasps had kept them from simply shooting him dead as he hovered to make the first shot.
He glanced at her, trying to mask his frustration with a weak smile. ‘This isn’t going to work, is it?’
The Sentinel lurched forwards another few feet, freeing itself entirely from the entangling wreckage of the gate. To Gorenn it was not a machine, for she knew machines. The Wasps had subjugated half her homeland with them, the noisy, stinking, clumsy things. This was something new, because no machine ever moved like that. To her, it was a living monster out of the worst of the old stories.
The Collegiates were now using the edges of the gateway for cover, driven back that far. It was all going to end soon. She had come here as the Commonweal Retaliatory Army, to fight the Wasps that had slaughtered her people in the Twelve-year War, but what had she accomplished?
‘Give it to me. Make it ready to catch fire,’ she told Laszlo.
‘Honestly, I don’t think it’s going to work-’
‘Just do it.’
The pair of them ducked out of the way as one of the Sentinel’s weapons struck stone chips from the nearby flagstones.
‘I have to get back to my ship,’ Laszlo was saying. ‘I have to find Mar’Maker. . I don’t know what I have to do.’ But he was binding another of the little fire-stones to her arrowhead. ‘Seriously, this-’
She brushed him off and, before her, its rounded prow almost fully out into the Collegium street, the great machine flexed and shook itself, settling the plates of its carapace and preparing itself for one last push.
She stepped into the air, arrow to the string, drawing back slowly, almost walking on nothing, so smooth was her ascent. Snapbow bolts spat past her, but only a few. She was nobody’s priority just then, compared to all the Apt soldiers with modern weapons that Collegium was fielding.
The monster looked at her as if it recognized the challenge. She hung in the air before its great blind face and heard the roar of its innards, felt the warmth of its engine breath wash over her.
It opened its great eye, which glared death, just like in the old stories but, knowing those stories as she did, she knew how heroes slew such monsters.
The arrow left the string without conscious thought or aim, and a thousand-year-old tradition met the most sophisticated artifice of the Iron Glove Cartel and the Wasp Empire, with a detour via the piecemeal arsenal of the Tidenfree, as she sent the grenade straight down the barrel of the Sentinel’s leadshotter.
She should have ducked away, then, but in her head she was the hero of myth, and such heroes did not shoot and run. They stood and watched the monster fall, or else they died. She was exactly in line with that killer eye, and if it spoke again, then there would not be enough left of Castre Gorenn to identify her kinden.
The grenade went off. She saw the flare and, for a moment, could not say whether this meant her triumph or her death. A moment later there was a hollow, muted thunder, and the Sentinel leapt a foot backwards, clawed metal feet skidding on the flagstones, and smoke was forcing its way out between its segments, and it was dead.
Then the Wasps began shooting at her in earnest, and Laszlo nipped past and caught hold of her ankle and hauled her out of the way, or she would surely have been killed.
‘Now! Charge them!’ came Padstock’s call. ‘Forward for Collegium! Through the Gate!’
The Wasps either side of the Sentinel braced themselves, with spears jutting forwards and snapbowmen behind, but they were packed together too closely to fight easily, and ye
t in a column too narrow for many of them to attack. They had been trading shot with the Collegiate archers, but as the Beetles and their allies surged forwards, Balkus pushed to the front and unloaded his nailbow into the closest batch, killing the spearmen in the front and clearing the way for the Vekken, who descended upon them with brutal efficiency. On the far side, a pair of Company soldiers followed his example with a repeating snapbow that miraculously failed to jam. Then the Maker’s Own Company rushed forwards, claiming either side of the smoking Sentinel and holding the gate.
Out there, beyond the wreckage of gate and machine, waited the Second Army in all its strength, yet still being picked apart piecemeal by the soldiers on the wall.
Stenwold claimed yet another abandoned snapbow and joined the other defenders. He could see a great many infantry out there, and now there came a brutal squad of Scorpion-kinden, the Aldanrael’s no doubt, armed with greatswords and already running full-speed as they rounded the gateway. There were pikemen amongst the Collegiate soldiers, but few of them, and it fell to the Vekken to shoulder forwards and hold the gap, shields locked and staving the huge warriors off, so that the Collegiate snapbowmen could bring them down one by one.
‘Maker!’ Balkus was shouting, pointing. Stenwold tried to peer beyond the fighting at what had caught the man’s eye. There was activity at the rear of the ruined Sentinel, but for a blurred moment he could not discern what it was.
‘They’re going to haul it out!’ Balkus yelled over the fighting. ‘We’re dead if they do!’
The engineers working there were shielded by the bulk of their dead machine. Stenwold backed off and round looked for a messenger. ‘Laszlo?’
‘Here, Mar’Maker!’ The little man presented himself smartly. ‘Got a message from the-’
‘No time,’ Stenwold snapped back. Right now it didn’t matter what the man was here for. ‘Get up to the wall, tell them to shoot anyone trying to get this wreck out of the gateway.’
Laszlo hesitated for a moment, caught in mid-errand, and then nodded and was gone, speeding out of the gateway and then straight up the wall.
The Imperial infantry was coming in again, as the last of the Scorpions fell, and now the Collegiates had the same difficulties, with those at the back unable to find a target. The Vekken shields held, though, and it was the Empire’s own hunger to take the gate that betrayed it. Had the Wasps stood off and kept shooting, the Ants would have been cut down in short order, but instead they threw themselves physically into the gap, and met the iron discipline of Vek and the marksmanship of the Merchant Companies.
Stenwold craned sideways, trying to mark the progress of the towing crew. He caught glimpses that showed him that Laszlo had passed on his orders — there was definitely shot coming from above — but flights of the Light Airborne were taking off as well, and he knew that they would tie up the soldiers on the wall.
He was so concerned with this that he missed what the other Sentinels were doing. Nobody noticed, until the Wasps on the right-hand side of the gateway fell back and scattered — by all appearances, a victory for the defenders. What was revealed, however, was the plated countenance of another of the armoured automotives, weirdly hunched so as to lower the aim of its leadshotter eye. There was barely a moment even to shout a warning before the thunderstroke of the weapon eclipsed all else, hammering into that narrow, packed corridor, obliterating the Vekken shield wall and killing a score and more of Company soldiers ranged behind them. Then the Imperial infantry were back, leading with their spears, trampling the wounded and the dying in order to claim that side of the broken Sentinel, just as the fallen machine began to scrape backwards, hauled by the efforts of its brethren.
Padstock was calling for her soldiers to hold fast, encouraging them, almost threatening them, but they were giving ground on both sides now, and soon there would not be two sides at all, but just a great gaping wound in the city’s defences. Stenwold heard Balkus’s nailbow sound off again, another magazine emptied, and then, stripped of ammunition, the big Ant had his sword out.
Stenwold discharged the snapbow over the heads of his fellows, hitting nothing, and then he drew his sword.
‘Collegium!’ he cried. ‘Collegium and liberty!’
Soldiers were crowding past him, pushing in to hold the gap, their faces taut with desperation. The air was thick with snapbow bolts, like little hornets.
Stenwold stepped forwards, at that moment no more than an extra defender against the tide, and a bolt ripped into him, cutting through his armour and between his ribs and exiting almost in the same instant, puncturing a clean hole all the way through, marked with a spray of blood.
He sat down, more surprised than anything. There was pain, but it came only when he breathed in. When he let the breath go there was just coughing, and blood on his hand when he took it away from his mouth.
He found he could not stand up. The strength that had carried him this far in his fight against the Empire had abruptly deserted him.
Someone was shaking him, which wasn’t helping. He saw Elder Padstock loom over him, her face aghast as it had never been during the fighting. Stenwold tried to reach up to comfort her, but his arm seemed far, far away.
‘Get him out of here!’ she was saying. ‘Get him to the surgeons!’
They must be talking about me, he realized. He tried to tell her that she had more important things to do, but he could only cough.
Beyond her, the Wasps were breaking through, He could only watch, see the last moments of the battle for the gateway, the bloody-minded determination on both sides, no quarter given, not an inch of ground won save in blood and bodies.
Then he was being lifted, a heavy old Beetle man cradled in the arms of a broad-shouldered Ant. Balkus.
Padstock turned back for the fight, chambering another bolt in her snapbow, and Stenwold saw her stagger, struck in the gut by one shot that punched its way out through her backplate. The next bolt snapped her head back, as though she was suddenly looking for the enemy amid the stones of the gateway above her. He saw her fall.
Then Balkus was lurching away, and Stenwold was denied the last moments of the city’s defence, the unspoken heroism of the end, such as never finds its way into the histories.
He felt Balkus stumble to one knee with a gasp, but then the man was up again, shambling and staggering, but putting distance between them and the gate.
A moment later there was a man buzzing about them, a high-pitched voice demanding to know what had happened: Laszlo.
‘Where’s the nearest surgeon?’ Balkus demanded, his voice strained, and then, ‘Piss on your cursed boat, we can’t make it all the way to the docks! Where’s a surgeon, please!’
‘I’ll get one, I’ll get one!’ Laszlo promised, and he was off, with Balkus yelling, ‘And a stretcher!’ after him,
They were three streets away from the gate now, and Stenwold found himself being lowered into a sitting position, his back against the wall of someone’s house. There were soldiers running past them, in both directions. Nobody seemed to be in charge but at least none of them was a Wasp, not yet.
Balkus sat down beside him. ‘Maker. .’
Stenwold managed to turn his head. There was a terrible pallor to the Ant’s skin, and where he had slid down the wall Stenwold could see a red smear. He tried to speak, but the words collapsed into little more than a grunt.
Balkus took a deep breath. ‘If you make it. When this is over. If you win.’ He grimaced. ‘Don’t let Sarn have Princep. You owe me that, now. Do something. Don’t let them ruin everything.’
A long pause.
‘And look after Sperra.’ The Ant gave long sigh. ‘This is a pisspoor way to go. I don’t like it.’
‘Not gone yet,’ it was just a whisper that Stenwold managed, but Balkus seemed to hear it. He did not answer, though.
Then people were crowding him, and he recognized the purple sashes of the Student Company. ‘It’s the War Master!’ And someone saying to get him to the C
ollege, where a lot of the healers and stitchers had been stationed.
‘Take him,’ he hacked out the words, jabbing a weak finger at Balkus, not knowing if the Ant lived or not.
The Light Airborne were persistent, but Straessa’s remaining command were allowing them nothing. Atop the wall, they had formed a tight cluster bristling with pikes, and with enough snap-bows to make the Wasps hurt every time they came close. One flank had already gone — she saw Wasps all over the wall there — but Kymene’s Mynans were holding firm on the far side, not so many of them as before, but they were solid, not giving an inch. And it seemed to the Antspider that the Airborne’s fervour was now slackening off. Are we beating them back? Surely we are.
Beside her, Castre Gorenn loosed her last shaft, slung her bow carefully on her shoulder, and then took up a pike that a fallen soldier had dropped, Straessa speculated grimly how many snapbow bolts her followers had left between them. She wondered how the rest of the Companies were faring, and what Eujen was doing. In that fraught time, as she loosed shot after shot, dragging her increasingly heavy sword free whenever the enemy got too close, she had time to wonder about a lot of things.
Then she heard her name called, and a moment later Averic almost bounced off the wall. He was looking pale, and with one sleeve slashed open and bloody. Someone hauled him upright and he clutched at Straessa, gasping ‘Get off the wall!’
‘We can’t. The defence-’ she started.
‘The gate’s lost!’ Averic managed to say. ‘Get down now or they’ll be coming up the stairs for you.’
‘Averic, seriously, we can’t just-’
‘Outwright’s is already going, those of his that can. The Spider-kinden are at them already. You’ve got to move,’ he insisted. He put a hand absently to his slashed sleeve and seemed surprised to see the blood there.
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