As they continued across the field, the little puffballs could be seen and heard all around them, wurbling contentedly as they continued their macabre work. Some of them had latched onto various Expedition members and let themselves be carried this way and that; this had caused some consternation, before it was discovered that they made for interesting and affectionate pets.
Skirting a [Dozer Mole] corpse being attended to by several of the creatures, Terisa mused, “I think these things are going to enjoy a lot of popularity when we return to the lowlands.”
“Cute. Useful,” her husband replied.
At that point, their leisurely stroll back toward the walls was interrupted—first by the sound of horns, and then a moment later by a resonating whump as a bright flare shot into the sky from within the fort’s walls.
Terisa broke into a jog, with Foz and the others falling in behind her. “That’s our recall sign,” she called. “Dana or the scouts must have found something.” Nessara and Kojeg met them at the fort’s gate, and once inside, Foz led the young beastkin down a side avenue back to their area. The mage and dwarf accompanied Terisa to the central field and pavilion.
“We need to make for the wall,” huffed Nessara. “Dana will join us soon.”
“Skitterlings,” Kojeg rumbled. “The lass’ latest drone brought back images of a full colony on the march less than an hour to the south.”
“Then why are we bothering with the walls?” the Huntress asked. “At least with her drones, we have warning; we should be heading for the bridge.”
“T’would mean leaving everything we’ve gathered, and the Worldwalker’s workshop. The lass refused when we suggested it.”
“More than refused,” Nessara grumped. “Either the translation spell the sages at Thun’Kadrass gave her is malfunctioning, or her world is stranger than we ever thought. I’m not sure the things she told me to do with my various body parts and a goat are even possible. It would at least require serious healing after the attempt.”
“You can’t stop a skitterling swarm,” Terisa objected. “They’re mindless bugs, except for the queens; you have to wipe them out or run. And I don’t think we have enough here to do that, even with Dana’s help.”
“I cannae say that, Teri,” countered Kojeg. “I’ve seen some of the things she’s built. And she tore off into her workshop, yelling about something called ‘counter-zerg protocols’.” The dwarf seemed rattled and unsure despite his casual words, nervously flexing his hand on the haft of his hammer. “I have faith we can hold the walls for a time, but t’would be best to be crossing the bridge sooner than later.”
The Dwarven Cannoneers had never left their posts on the walls, and were now being joined by the other adventurers of the Expedition. Terisa recognized one slender, brown-robed figure in particular, and made her way along the wall to the necromancer’s side. The man had a pale green puffball stuck to his shoulder, and seemed infatuated by his new pet, despite the news of the approaching danger.
“I know you prefer healing, Biggles,” Terisa began, “but can you do anything with all the dead moles out there to help with the defenses?”
Biggles rubbed his cheek, considering Terisa’s question. “Normally I wouldn’t have the time to prepare them, but Wuffle’s kindred seems to have been extremely effective at cleaning the flesh from the bones. I can sense hundreds of constructs’ worth of skeletons out there, although I’ll need two or three large mana crystals in order to make anything useful of them.”
Terisa blinked. “Wuffle?”
“Oh, yes! We seem to have bonded quite handily.” Biggles reached up to his shoulder and gently patted the puffball. “Wuffle cleans the bones and my sample jars better than anything I’ve got on my table.”
Terisa turned back to Nessara. “Can you and your fellow mages assist him?”
The other woman leaned on her staff, deep in thought, for several heartbeats. “We don’t touch necromancy,” she said slowly. “The Magisterium doesn’t truck with anything that even smells like soul magics.”
Biggles made a placating gesture as he broke back into the conversation. “No, no soul magic. Even if I wanted to, there’s too much death energy; it’d take days to sanctify the grounds to the point where things won’t get corrupted on their way across the veil. Second, I’ve never tried necromancy in the Wildlands; I don’t know how the Mana will react. Even after all that, we’d need to strike a bargain with whatever we found. I refuse to simply bind a soul; I don’t need the [Oracle]’s eye on me.” He shook his head. “No, this would just be a simple reanimation; all I’d need is raw power.”
“That we can help with,” Nessara replied, relieved. “As can the Swift Waters enchanters, if their representative is agreeable?” she continued with a nod as the guild representative joined them on the wall. “Mister Chadwick, Swift Waters claimed the largest of the intact rockmaw crystals. May we use a few of them for a linked circle?”
The man’s robes were an almost offensive shade of blue, with ostentatious gold embroidery filigreed across his shoulders and down his sleeves. The rings and bracelets he wore on his hands were as pompous and gaudy as they were useful, and the expensive enchantments layered into the adornments leaked enough magical energy to set Terisa’s nose to itching. He wasn’t the usual Swift Waters delegate Terisa was used to dealing with, and she wouldn’t have even entertained the notion of bringing him, but for the fact that the guild funded a significant portion of the Expedition’s expenses every year. She could tolerate snobbishness and foppery for the right price, and it helped that Chadwick seemed capable, if supremely annoying.
“If it means keeping the rest of the crystals safe, by all means,” he agreed, spreading his arms. “We’ve sunk entire fortunes into this year’s venture, and it would be a shame to have to return empty handed.”
Nessara stepped closer to confer with the necromancer. “Which form of circle are you more familiar with?”
“Three groups of three magi with a crystal for each group should be enough. I’d like seven groups, if I thought we could spare the mages.” Biggles patted Wuffle gently while he considered. “I suppose three of three would be best, though, so the others can link up for barriers.”
Terisa turned away from the mage and the necromancer, her attention drawn by the sound of a young Luparan running toward their section of the wall. In her impatience, she simply leapt off the wall rather than take the stairs, landing on the cobblestone path below with a grunt of exertion and a sudden ache in her knees. I’ll regret that later , she mused. I’m not exactly young anymore . Her thoughts were tinged with a rueful melancholy; for all she’d accomplished, she hadn’t taken a level in two years, and her natural regeneration was leaving her more and more. I should probably just retire and let someone else take over the Expedition.
The wolfling slowed as she approached, clearly excited or agitated by something. “I think the Worldwalker is in trouble, Lady Huntress. She tore apart the back of her giant carriage and keeps shouting horrible things at it.” His ear flicked, directing his attention behind him for a moment as he cocked his head curiously. “Is her world full of people who mate with their mothers?”
“I don’t believe so, but it’s certainly full of strange people and things.” Workers in the livery of the Swift Waters Guild went jogging by as the Huntress and the wolfkin made their way to the center of the fort’s grounds. Nessara and Biggles had the initial defenses well in hand, it seemed, and Terisa stepped to one side of the path to let a pair of porters pass. carrying a crated Mana crystal. As they approached the central clearing, clangs, shouts of helpers, and one swearing Worldwalker could be heard.
Dana’s “mobile workshop”, as she called it, normally travelled as three massive metal sections connected by an assortment of hinges, hoses, and cables that allowed it to wind its way along the roads on its massive spoked wheels. The three oversized carriages that made up the travelling behemoth were now disconnected from each other, and Foz was helping several
other Ursara push the middle section to another recently cleared area of the fort’s central courtyard. The front section was opened wide, racks of strange tools and coiled loops of cables scattered about in Dana’s rush to do her work. The rear section the otherworlder had referred to as a crawler was now partially dismantled, exposing an inner construct Terisa barely recognized as a golem core. She’d seen many sorts of golems, and up until now, they’d all been powered and controlled by a single Mana crystal encased in an enchanted frame.
The crawler’s heart, however, was a contraption of interlocking ring gears around a central grooved spindle, each groove holding a single sliver of crystal, thinner than one of the arrows the Huntress fired from her bow, and almost as long. The otherworld engineer was just finishing seating the last of the new crystal spines into one of the grooves, seven discarded crystals of lower quality dropped haphazardly on the ground. As the Huntress drew closer, Dana scuttled around to the other side of the crawler. Several clanking thunks and declarations about the contraption being derived from incestuous heritage later, the assembly of rings rotated around the center, and with a thrum of power, they shrank down to fit neatly around the slowly spinning core.
“I’ve never seen a golem core like that in all my years,” Terisa exclaimed as a steel housing engraved with control runes slid smoothly into place around the mechanical wonder.
“That’s because it’s technically not a golem core,” mumbled Dana past some sort of flanged tool she held in her teeth, both hands and all but two of her mechanical limbs making adjustments on the underside of the contraption. “It’s a—Hold on.”
The woman’s helmet snapped back into place after she spat out the metal tool, a dark visor covering her eyes as one of her metal appendages flipped its end around with a whirring flash. Bright sparks followed as the Worldwalker fused a steel support strut into place on the underside of the machine before skittering her way back out from beneath it.
“Standard golem cores have plenty of power packed into one big crystal, but they’re slow to transfer the energy out of the core to the rest of the golem. Unexpected power demands can destabilize the core, usually catastrophically, so golem frames keep it nice and slow.” Dana’s voice was tinny at first, until her helmet retracted once again. As she spoke, she manipulated several levers and knobs on the side of the crawler and then backed away. The machine’s core slid back into the housing of the metal beast, the deep rumble of gears and other strange devices heralding the metallic clunking as the outer armor plates closed back up and the legs began to unfold from the sides.
“The crawler has different power needs, though, and by design, she needs to draw power a lot more quickly than the standard architecture allows. Her reactor core is seven crystal shards in a stabilizing matrix, to buffer the power transference under loads a normal golem simply wouldn’t be able to handle. Smaller crystals, but more total power, and more efficiency overall. She’s actually able to recharge in a third of the time a single bigger crystal would take!”
“I’m no golemist, but that sounds very impressive,” acknowledged Terisa. “But I thought you were limited on ammunition?”
“On physical rounds for the crawler, yes,” replied the Worldwalker as she dashed around picking up tools and parts. The inferior mana crystals went into a crate packed with straw, which was soon tucked into the shelving on the still-opened front section of the workshop. “But I’m not using the crawler’s guns for this; Foz and the others are pushing the big gun into place right now.”
“The ‘big gun’? I shudder to think what you used on the rockmaw stampede wasn’t a ‘big gun’,” said the Huntress, unable to repress an involuntary shiver. Horns sounded from the walls as they spoke, and Terisa glanced back to see flares of light and lightning springing up around the fort. “They’ve sighted the skitterlings,” she said tensely. “Biggles is animating skeletons from the [Dozer Moles] to buy us time, and then it’s gonna be dirty. What are you contributing?”
“Well,” said Dana as several sections of her suit reconfigured, then dropped away, leaving the otherworlder sitting in a nearly immodest state in a stripped-down, chair-type configuration. A flattened oblong metal crate next to her suddenly split along previously invisible seams, runes glowing and shifting as a new armored shell seemed to assemble itself around her. Where the previous suit had seemed functional and utilitarian, this one was obviously heavier and more heavily armed, shrouding the Worldwalker in a far more sinister form.
“There was a weapons program on my world; one of many, of course. It doesn’t matter what it was called, and the name wouldn’t mean anything to you anyway, but the tests were abandoned because the soldiers who would have used the weapon could never have escaped its area of effect.”
Terisa appeared unimpressed. “That doesn’t fill me with confidence. Give me a reason not to declare this Expedition over and get everyone across the bridge right now.”
“Kojeg tells me you can kill the queens if we can crack their armor.”
“I can,” Terisa confirmed as she hefted her bow. “Or rather, we can, my sister and me. But first we have to deal with the worker and soldier forms in the swarm, and it can take hours of battle and dozens of mages to break their defenses down. And if there’s more than one queen…”
The crawler had continued its reconfiguration, clanking and thumping emanating from its internal systems as it lumbered to a standing position on its six metal legs. Dana’s armored glove retracted partially, leaving her fingers and palm bare as she reached up to touch it.
She furrowed her brow, speaking in a short, clipped tone. “Engage Autonomous Mode, Defender protocol.”
Terisa opened her mouth to respond, but before she could, a harsh, mechanical voice rose from around her.
“Autonomous Mode confirmed. Initializing Defender protocol.”
Terisa actually jumped back in surprise as the crawler spoke in response. “I thought you said it couldn’t function as a normal golem on its own!”
“It can’t,” she admitted, “but it can follow limited preset directives.”
The massive metal beast shook the ground as it moved its legs to turn in place. One by one, each leg raised itself off the ground and slammed downward, each foot springing open as three spikes lanced into the cobbles of the ancient courtyard. The legs folded in, lowering the front of the crawler’s body. The rearmost section rotated to point upward, and the outer ringed sections of its shell began to rotate and pulse with a gentle blue light from the runes inscribed on the metal.
“Defender mode will give us an extra shield,” Dana said as she finished packing up the workshop section of the first metal carriage. The shop then closed up, leaving just the hatch-like portal on the side, which the Worldwalker closed behind herself as she stepped out and headed toward the middle section. Foz and the other Ursara had finally managed to push the oversized wagon into place, where Dana had somehow cut markings into the ground to indicate where she needed it to go. She continued speaking as they neared the contraption.
“Between the walls, the shield, and any barriers the mages can give us, I’m confident Castra Pristis can take it. It may get uncomfortably hot, but it will be brief. Or should be; I couldn’t test these rounds at Thun’Kadrass. Shouldn’t you already be at the walls?”
“My own wide-area attacks wouldn’t put a dent in the workers and soldiers of the skitterling swarm,” the Huntress replied as the cannons began to fire, accompanied by the stuttering cacophony of Dana’s Mana-bolt machineguns. “But if you can crack the queen’s armor, Althenea can take out the lot of them with one shot. I just can’t use that skill twice in a row; it will take me days to recover. So it has to count.”
“Oh, it will,” Dana said with a sinister grin. The central section of her workshop reacted as she laid her bared palm against the side, the six wheels churning up stone and dirt as they twisted, and the axles bent to lay the rims flat on the earth. The top and sides of the carriage split with a hum and folded o
utward as both women stepped back, and what was obviously a cannon of some sort was revealed.
But what a cannon, thought Terisa. Instead of a fat, elongated bell shape akin to the dwarven cannons she was already familiar with, this weapon revealed an elegance the Huntress couldn’t put words to. The central barrel was narrower than those others, its bore barely larger than her arm. Flattened rectangular ports on the end flared backward, bracketing the muzzle of the gun, and a pair of massive springs on each side held it in place on a sliding rail. Twice as long as she was tall, the gun slowly elevated with a gentle, mechanical whirr that ill fit its deadly purpose. A double row of shells sat nested into a sliding rack on one side, and as Terisa watched, mechanical components took one of the conical shells and fed it into the cannon’s breech.
“First round is a standard charge, to confirm range and accuracy.” Dana held out a strange flattened device inset with impossibly tiny runes, and as it began to glow, a small-scale image of the fort and the surrounding area was projected into the air in front of the two women. “I’ve had the drones mapping out the area. If I can build a radio, or find a magical equivalent, I can do targeting in real-time, but for now we’ll have to settle for a little delay.”
Dana thumped a metal barrel on the side of the cannon, and a small golem suddenly sprang to action. Legs sprouted from the barrel, and it hopped off the side of the machine, trailing a thin cable that spooled out from within itself. The other end of the cord disappeared behind one of the panels of the gun’s carriage. It followed Dana as she headed for the wall, Terisa in tow.
“That’s a lot of bugs,” said the Worldwalker as they reached the parapet. Nessara and Biggles stood in a circle with the guild representative, a man-sized crystal shard floating between them. Three more mages stood in a circle over a dozen paces to their left, and another three to their right, both with crystals of their own. Eerie drafts of lucent green drifted between the crystals and the mages, flowing around the necromancer as he directed a skeletal army; one which was in very real danger of being overrun simply by the sheer numbers of the enemy. Other mages held position at the ready near each of the dwarven cannon emplacements, and Foz and the beastkin stood on the southern wall, ready for their own grim work when the time came.
Skyclad (Fate's Anvil Book 1) Page 47