Skyclad (Fate's Anvil Book 1)

by Scott Browder

  Biggles himself stood motionless, knuckles white as he gripped the stone to hold himself up. Sweat ran down his brow with the effort, but his skill at his craft was evident in the growing berm of insectile forms building up over a thousand paces south of the walls. “The skitterlings aren’t going around,” he declared through clenched teeth. “When the queen appears, she’ll be bringing soldiers with her. The constructs won’t hold after that.”

  “This is gonna be loud,” Dana declared, pulling a cord from their golem escort and plugging it into a slot on the back of her armored arm. She held out the flattened device once again, inspecting the map and tapping at the runes. “Adjusting angle. Biggles, if this takes out some of your constructs, I’m sorry.”

  “A few is no issue, but if I lose too many, they’ll hit the walls,” he grunted.

  “Fire in the hole! ” the Worldwalker shouted, her voice pitched differently than Terisa had ever heard. It carried across the fort, leaving a sudden questioning silence for a single, brief moment.

  The impact of the cannon firing was a thing felt more than heard, the thump of the ground against her feet almost enough to set the Huntress to dancing to keep her balance just a split second before the sound itself reached her ears. Many times louder than any of the dwarven guns, the noise reached her ears with a ringing impact. The world shook, and chunks of dirt and stone flew back from the Engineer’s cannon. Foz and the other beastkin crouched instinctively, many wincing and holding their ears.

  “Three…” Dana said. “Two. One.”

  Several dozen skitterlings, resembling nothing so much as common ants writ large, suddenly vanished in a shower of dirt and stone. The low rumble that reached their ears on the walls was much deeper and less jarring than the initial firing, but no less terrifying for its lack of volume. Two of the skeletal constructs nearest the blast simply collapsed, the animating magic no longer able to hold them together. Biggles breathed more heavily, straining to hold the rest.

  The explosion and loss gave the swarm no pause, and Terisa readied her bow as dozens of even larger soldiers made their way out of the trees behind the frenzied horde. “How is that supposed to break the queen’s armor?” the Huntress demanded. “She’ll be here soon, following behind the soldiers.”

  “That isn’t supposed to do anything to the queen’s armor.” Dana checked her map again, switching her gaze between it and the tree line. “Biggles, the next time I fire, you might consider dropping all the constructs and throwing up a shield.”

  “What kind of shield?” he grunted exasperatedly “You realize the headaches this is going to cause all of us if I simply sever the links to the constructs?”

  “What do you mean what kind of shield?” Dana asked. “And I think I see the queen!”

  The magical strain made Biggles’ words sound forced as he snapped, “Flame shield? Wind barrier? Sonic attenuation? Any of a dozen and a half other shield types?”

  “Queen, tree line, two hundred paces west of the southern trail!” called Terisa, drawing Althenea and nocking one of her most expensive arrows. The destructive enchantment inscribed on the adamantine broadhead would have cost a years’ pay to most working classers without the Huntress’ unique connections and wealth. “If you can crack her armor, I can kill her.”

  “How do you expect to punch through with just one shot?” asked Nessara. Magic swirled around the woman as she added her own strength to Biggles’ channeling.

  “I don’t intend to just break the queen’s armor,” Dana replied, shaking her head. “I’m taking out most of that swarm, too.” The queen lumbered out of the forest then, several times larger than even Dana’s crawler. It was escorted by soldiers even larger than the last group, whose gargantuan mandibles chewed through everything in their queen’s path: rocks, trees, and even the odd unfortunate worker skitterling who failed to clear the path in time.

  “How on earth are you going to do that?” came the frustrated and strained question from Nessara.

  Dana grinned. “Remember what I said about pulling energy out of a Mana crystal too fast? I engineered a round to do that deliberately to a shard about the size of my fingernail. Then I packed it into a compression chamber. When the shell hits, it destabilizes the crystal, then annihilates it all at once! Simple, right? Fire in the hole! ”

  The cannon thumped once more, as if in agreement, but the assembled group could hardly hear it over their own sudden horror. The blood drained from Nessara’s cheeks, her ashen expression one Terisa would not soon forget. Chadwick lost control of his bladder, the front of his gaudy blue robes turning a dark color. Biggles and the other mages dropped their necromantic spells, the constructs slumping to the earth. The Mana around the crystals changed from green to bluish-white as the mages began casting a shield around them. From the southern wall, Foz heard Dana’s proclamation as well, and his hasty commands had the beastkin and dwarves diving as one, covering their heads in sheer panic.

  Dana simply stood in place, her armor suddenly glowing with sigils that projected several layers of shielding around the top of the gate tower. “Why’s everybody being all dramatic? It’s seriously a tiny shard. And the math checked out!”

  And then the shell slammed into the ground a few paces away from the queen, who stopped at the sudden geyser of dirt. For a half of a heartbeat, Terisa was sure something had gone wrong.

  Then the shell exploded, and the entire world disappeared into a sea of white.

  * * *

  Morgan had stopped running to eat, her third such break of the day. Bursts of [Acceleration] let her cover ground at an amazing pace, but the caloric cost to sustain such motion wasn’t something she could keep up for very long. So, she’d brought several dozen leaf-wrapped parcels of meat, and in the two days since heading for the people she’d sensed, she’d consumed almost all of them.

  “I have to be getting close, Lulu,” she said after finishing her meal, while the scrubby cleaned the grease off her hands. “I know I’m going the right direction, but I could be miles to one side or the other by the time I get there.”

  She rose from her seat. A fallen log with moss growing over it had made for a comfortable place of respite while she’d had a brief rest and a snack. Without wasting any more time, she continued on her way, heading roughly south by southwest—at least, by her best reckoning. Don’t really have a way to make a compass, not that I know of, she thought to herself as she jogged along. Her meal would take an hour or so to fully replenish her reserves, and she wanted to pace herself before returning to her skills.

  It was well past noon before she got close enough that her [Spell Resonance] let her sense the faintest echoes of activity in the distance. She surmised she might make it by nightfall at her current pace, even if she didn’t use [Acceleration]. The impressions she sensed at such a distance were vague, and while she was sure some of it was gun or cannon fire, she couldn’t be sure who or what was fighting. Too many feet hitting too much ground over too much of an area; only the rapid thumps of weapons were sharp enough to stand out.

  So she restrained herself, resisting the urge to make a mad dash and use up her reserves. She was down to three meals in her storage, and had no clue if the people at the far end would even be friendly. The thought that they might have ill intentions had crossed her mind more than once while she ran, but she was willing to chance it, in case they were nice. If they weren’t, she’d have to run, and she didn’t want to be stuck without food in such circumstances.

  Suddenly there came a far sharper, far louder impact. Her senses were instantly on edge as she skidded to a stop, pausing to feel for more tremors. Some sort of booming concussion had cut through the low rumbling of everything else, nearly stinging her feet as [Spell Resonance] transferred the sensation. All the other vibrations through the ground seemed to fall away for a moment before resuming again, and Morgan stood still for several heartbeats. She’d barely taken another step before her senses were overloaded.

  She sensed a flash
of heat, a rumble of earth, and it took her nearly a full minute to realize she was actually physically hearing the sound with her own ears and not just through her [Spell Resonance]. Thunder rolled in a continuous rumble throughout the valley, and the sky to the southeast was visibly brighter in the early afternoon. The Sorceress stumbled, catching herself just before falling, as Lulu wurbled with surprised concern from her shoulder.

  “Oh, god…”

  She continued more slowly, picking her way up the mountainside to the next ridge. Dread filled her at the thought of what she suspected she’d see, and was made manifest when she crested the rocky ledge at the very top.

  “Someone built a nuke in this world?” she wondered in a small voice.

  An ominously glowing cloud was forming in the distance, the emblematic shape of destruction writ large and terrible, simultaneously idolized and feared in the fictional works of her own world. It wasn’t as big as she’d been afraid of, but it cast dead shadows across the low mountains to the south. Violent lightnings danced around the edges of the darkness, and she could feel her skin prickle with tingling and burning sensations that healed as fast as they appeared.

  “Radiation, has to be. It’s like a really itchy sunburn.” She patted the loofah on her shoulder, but Lulu seemed even less bothered by it than Morgan. “If it gets worse, you may have to hide in one of my runes, girl. I have to check for survivors.”

  So Morgan ran once more, discarding caution and using [Acceleration] as much as she dared. She hoped there were still people left when she arrived.

  * * *

  Terisa staggered to her feet, leaning heavily against the stone parapet as she fumbled at her belt. Her breath came in ragged gasps, and twin spears of agony lanced into her brain; she knew in that instant that she’d been blinded, and if she didn’t move quickly, it might well be a permanent affliction. Her right hand gripped Althenea tightly, the bow pulsing with barely-contained panic, while her left rummaged through the pouches sewn into her wyvern-hide breeches. She calmed her breathing as her fingers finally closed around a familiarly shaped bottle, drawing it forth and tearing the stopper out with her teeth. She drank the bitter potion in a single motion as she began to feel again. Her exposed arms, legs, face, what little cleavage her tunic exposed—all of it stung from the flash of hellish heat that had burned out her eyes.

  A standard healing potion would have only stopped the damage and scarred it over—but Terisa was no standard adventurer, and this no standard potion. The elixir (which she had saved for emergencies not exactly like this one) tasted vile, but it worked, and Terisa felt her natural regeneration amplify a hundredfold under its effects. Her eyes itched maddeningly as they grew back, repairing the damage, and eventually restoring functional, albeit blurry, sight. Such potions fetched a king’s ransom, but when you needed them most, nothing else could compare.

  As her vision cleared, the Huntress lowered her bow and pushed herself off the parapet to survey the destruction the Engineer had wrought. The forest had been blown down like matchsticks in a circle stretching for miles away from the fort, and charred, smoking corpses lay strewn amongst the fallen trees like so many lumps of coal. To Dana’s credit, the crawler’s shield had done its job; though the shield itself was barely visible to the naked eye, its effect was visible as a curved line several dozen paces out from the fort’s walls, against which a wave of debris had piled up to form a noticeable berm.

  It had not, however, stopped all of the tremendous heat from the blast, and the battlements of Castra Pristis bore the scars: they’d been scorched by the heat, with strangely-formed shadows seemingly etched into the surfaces that had faced the blast. They looked much like the skitterlings, but cast in silhouette against the stones, as if thrown there by an evening sun. The towering cloud above rumbled ominously, eerie lightning flashing in its depths.

  Dana herself stood rigid and motionless atop the tower, as if her armor had locked her in place. Terisa thought to herself that that must have been what happened. The suit creaked, smoke drifting in thin, curling tendrils away from the joints and seams. She managed to turn her head fractionally to either side, and the effort seemed to push the suit out of whatever lockdown mode it had been pressed into. With a hiss, the faceplate bulged forward, then slid up over the woman’s head, stunned disbelief written across her features.

  “I-I think…” she croaked.

  “I think you made a miscalculation,” Terisa said frostily, not taking her eyes off the field. Biggles and his mages, and Foz and his beastmen and dwarves, were just starting to regain their footing. Singed one and all, but their concerned shouts didn’t have the overtones of panic that might indicate severe injury; nobody else had stared directly into the blast as she had. Terisa scanned the battlefield once more, desperately searching for any sign of the skitterling queen.

  Dana’s suit creaked again as she flexed her limbs, runes flickering across its exterior as it worked to repair the damage she had incurred. “Just, ah, a rough estimate,” she replied with a nervous laugh, putting her suit through a brief self-test. “I, ah, don’t have proper equipment to get a real measurement, but I was expecting maybe point three kay-tee? But that was more like…had to be at least a kiloton, just to look at the mushroom cloud! I don’t understand, the math checked out, it shouldn’t have—”

  The Engineer’s babbling was cut short by a low, persistent beeping and strident flashing from a raised section of her armored left arm. Startled, she slid a panel back and peered at something, swearing vehemently. “Ah, shit , I’m getting readings on my dosimeter. It’s not terribly high, but it’s concerning enough as it is—”

  Terisa cut her off with a sharp gesture. “Explain later. The queen’s not here, but there are still plenty of soldiers and workers, and they’re still coming .”

  The smoking earth around the crater where the weapon went off still glowed with heat, and the skitterlings surrounding it seemed unwilling to cross. Suddenly Terisa glanced skyward, bidden by her instincts, or possibly the rising cry from the people within the fort. As she looked up, a shape fell from the sky, still glowing and trailing smoke. The remains of the skitterling queen, merely a chunk of her armored carapace, slammed back to earth, sending a tremor through the ground as it bounced once, then came to rest.

  “Miss Dana,” Terisa began, her eyes on the tree line. Her sharp-eyed gaze saw more chitinous soldiers boiling forth from the tree line, ahead of a second lumbering shape whose presence poured icy dread into the Huntress’ heart. “While I’m thankful I didn’t end up wasting my ultimate skill, please tell me you have a less destructive way to crack a queen’s shell?”

  Dana’s gaze snapped to Terisa, then out to the tree line. “I…I don’t even have another annihilator,” she said softly. “I-it was a prototype. I don’t know if standard rounds will do the job.”

  The second queen broke through the tree line, and the milling workers and soldiers let out hissing, insectile screams as they were driven forth by the new queen’s orders. They surged forth across the cracked, seared ground, the lead ants bursting into flames, falling, and being trampled by those behind them. Foz’s bellowing roar rose from within the fort, followed by howls, barked commands, and acknowledgments as the beastmen and dwarves made ready to hold the walls in a desperate stand.

  “This won’t be fun, Worldwalker,” the [Wild-Heart Huntress] warned. “Hit the queen with everything you have. If you can weaken her armor, I’ll take the shot.”

  Dana responded with a quiet nod, her helmet slipping back into place. Nessara, Biggles, and the mages had finally reset themselves, and barriers once more sprang into existence as they returned to their work. Cheers resounded as the guns resumed their monotonous thumping, flinging death out over the walls into the onrushing horde.

  The first shot landed short of the queen, but the second, third, and then several more thudded into its armored carapace. The swarm didn’t falter, more of the bugs flooding out of the trees, pushing their brethren up agai
nst the walls, and then simply up the walls. Terisa kept her arrow nocked, watching the queen and trusting Kojeg and the mages to keep the gate-tower clear. Biggles and Nessara were wreathed in eerie light, each supporting one side of a low, translucent dome, and the dwarf laid about with his hammer to crush intruders that pushed under the edge of the shield.

  “Twelve more rounds,” shouted the Worldwalker. “I don’t think they’re having any effect!” Each impact drove the queen into a low crouch, but the monstrous creature simply shrugged its cottage-sized bulk and crept forward under the deluge. And then the gun went silent. “That’s all I have,” said Dana, yanking out the cord through which she’d controlled the massive gun. “I’ll have to get close and see if I can cut through with my fusion blades.”

  As she spoke the last, her suit went from two legs back to four, then six, then eight. Four appendages held her off the ground, and the other four sprouted glowing knives of hard-edged light. Another giant ant had forced its way under the edge of the dome held up by the mages, opposite the side Kojeg defended. Dana’s blades snicked out too fast even for Terisa to see clearly, and the bug fell, hewn into two pieces that dripped smoking ichor.

  “Something’s coming!” Biggles shouted suddenly, turning to face the mountainside to the northwest of the fort.

  Nessara turned to look as well. “Earth Mana, and Fire! It’s the same as the day of the rockmaw stampede!” she shouted.

  Terisa felt it as well suddenly. A shiver beneath her feet, a low rumble. The skitterling queen stumbled in its tracks, and she finally took her eyes off the bugs to see what the mages had turned to look at.