‘No more useless than our snapbows,’ the Antspider told him, and from below there came a catastrophic cracking sound, enough to shiver the stones beneath their feet. Then a storm of Wasp Airborne were all about them – but these had come up from below, where they had ceased disputing the ground inside the gate. Snapbow bolts darted through their number, picking some off, but they were keeping low to the wall – close enough for the Antspider to have stabbed one if she had been quick enough – denying the Student Company snapbowmen across the street an easy target.
Laszlo and most of the others risked a glimpse over the parapet, despite the sporadic snapbow shot sleeting up towards them. The Sentinels were still in motion, the barrels of those single eyes flashing fire as they cast leadshot at the gate, whilst one was now stepping backwards, almost dainty despite its size, lining itself up for what looked like a final charge.
Laszlo stared at them, watching ballista bolts and shot rock the heavy machines without harming them, seeing those leadshotter eyes blaze. His career had been a varied one, with all the resourcefulness of a pirate who has to make do with whatever’s to hand. He had seen a great many tricks tried, during his young life, and heard of many more. Most of all, he had never given up. Even as a prisoner at the bottom of the sea, surrounded by the killing ocean on all sides, he had not lost heart. It would take more than the Wasp Empire to break him.
‘Antspider, you’ve got archers? Real bowmen?’
Stenwold was out of bolts, but there were handfuls for the taking wherever he looked, in the quivers of the fallen, or just spilled onto the ground. He dropped down beside a dead Wasp soldier and, as his hands worked to strip the man of his ammunition, he considered the convenience of Collegium having inherited this weapon from the Empire in the first place. The standard for snapbow ammunition was more universal than the Helleren mint.
Elder Padstock’s voice came to him from close by – she was trying to shout her soldiers into some sort of order, but the Wasps were not cooperating. They were everywhere – each man operating on his own, striking and flying, keeping on the move, refusing to stand and fight. A couple of their giant insects remained, too, wings shattered and their chitin cracked by shot, but still scissoring their mandibles at every enemy within reach. Enough of the Imperials were getting in the way of the Vekken to ensure that the gates had barely been reinforced, just a few more girders fitted in place before the Ant-kinden had turned to defending themselves. In the close confines of the gateway, their shortswords claimed more of the enemy than the Collegiate snapbows, while the Maker’s Own soldiers resorted to swords of their own, trusting to their heavier armour to counterbalance their lesser skill.
The gates were crashing and shuddering under a solid rhythm now, like a bar of metal being hammered into shape by three smiths all at once. Ordinary rams would not have achieved so much, with their slow, patient battering. Of all the malevolent wonders of artifice this war had brought with it, only the Sentinels had endured to this bitter end.
We should have a gatehouse here, not just a square and a broad avenue, was Stenwold’s desperate thought. Even with soldiers on every rooftop, it should not be so easy to break into our city. But, of course, Collegium’s gates were primarily built to welcome in trade, with defence a distant second. Did we have time to change that, since the Vekken first attacked?
‘Through the Gate!’ Padstock was bellowing, sounding ludicrous really, but it was the war cry of Maker’s Own, and her men took it as the inspiration it was meant to be. Stenwold emptied his borrowed snapbow into the first Wasp he saw – missing even at this range, shooting too high in his fear of hitting his allies. Then another dozen Airborne had crashed into the group of soldiers beside him, and someone kicked him in the chest as he crouched there, bowling him over. He lost hold of the snapbow again and simply picked up a discarded sword, seeing Elder Padstock hack her blade into the neck of a Wasp, bludgeoning him down by main force rather than any attempt at fencing.
The next impact on the gates thundered through the enclosed space like a grenade explosion, carrying with it the snapping of wood and the shrieking of metal wrenched beyond its capability to resist. Stenwold stood there, unused sword in hand, and his eyes registered what the gates had become. The bracing had been uprooted by the impact, a mess of jagged-ended metal that had torn into attackers and defenders alike, and the heavy shutters backing the gate had been twisted apart, revealing the abused and splintered timber beneath, with a dozen gashes of daylight already ripped in them.
The Airborne were instantly departing, and it seemed a victory, a momentary, ridiculous victory, because it would have made more sense for them to stay and try to hold the breach so that their infantry comrades could break through. But their losses, and the anticipation that the gates were about to give way, triggered something in them that had them funnelling back into the open, braving the Collegiate shot to flee back to their own lines. The Vekken and Maker’s Own were left in sole possession of the gateway.
The ravaged gates shuddered and spasmed like dying things under the Sentinels’ leadshot barrage, but still they held, doing generations of Collegiate engineers proud. The Vekken – those that were left – formed a solid shield wall backed by cross-bowmen, a tight-packed formation five men deep, and Stenwold was shouting for them to back off, because that was the previous generation’s war, which Vek – and the Ant-kinden in general – should have discarded by now. He saw a dark face look back at him – perhaps it was even Termes – but they did not shift, instead just bracing themselves and leaving space before the gate for the ram to come through.
But when it did come through, it was far more than a ram of course. The blunt prow of the Sentinel hammered home, and this time the gates parted, wood and twisted metal slamming back against the walls and the voracious machine shouldering through, its front a map of dents and scars, but its armour intact despite that. Its eye opened and the leadshotter spoke, mounted too high for the enemy facing it, but the sheer explosive sound of it staggered them all, and the ball whistled overhead to smash into the front of a building directly across the square, punching out an extra, rough-edged window.
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 yet 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 m
atter 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.
War Master's Gate (Shadows of the Apt) Page 44
