by Frank Morin
Even though she had, they still might not survive.
Kirstin’s Defense had become so saturated with monsters that its power became overwhelmed. Verena sensed it reaching its upper limit and wanted to scream with frustration. Why couldn’t it last just a few more minutes? She needed the information Water could provide as badly as she needed those monsters destroyed.
Water sensed it too. She cocked her head to the side and sighed, looking so sad that Verena wanted to weep. What truths could the elemental share with her?
“Go, daughter of men. Perhaps Builders will once again learn to step through this threshold and across the final bridge. Know that we hope for your success.”
“Wait!” Verena cried, but Water saluted, and an invisible force cast Verena’s mind out of the mechanical. She came to herself in a rush and staggered back from the plaque. The smooth obsidian cracked with a loud report, its power also spent.
Verena swayed and would have fallen, but a strong soldier caught her. “Easy, Lady Verena. What’s wrong?”
“Was that you’re doing?” Another woman asked. She wore the insignia of a Spitter, and her expression looked awed.
“It’s coming down!” A soldier cried, and they all turned to look.
Kirstin’s Defense collapsed. Waters cascaded down all around the city in a tidal wave miles in circumference. Verena imagined she could feel the ground shaking beneath the city like a death knell.
There were still too many summoned monsters. They could never stop them all.
“Prepare!” she shouted and pushed away from the soldier supporting her. She still felt weak, but couldn’t waste time. She ignored shouted questions and plunged back down into the tower. She nearly fell on the steps, and had to lean on the stone wall for support.
“What’s going on out there?” one of the officers inside called.
“We slowed them, but they’re coming. All units prepare to engage.”
Verena slid down the ladder, missing most of the rungs, but managed not to fall off. She dropped into her chair, her mind still reeling from the vision of Water and the incredible experience of feeling so immersed in that unbelievable mechanical.
She allowed herself one heartfelt shriek of frustration that the wall hadn’t held longer. The sound reverberated many times in the tiny, enclosed command room. She’d been so close to learning so much! Was that why Kirstin had discovered so many Builder secrets? Had she learned the secret of a Builder threshold and crossed it?
Verena needed time to write down everything she’d experienced and time to try recreating that link, but she didn’t have time. Merkland was still about to be overrun by a monstrous swarm that they could not stop.
So she reactivated the sentinels. Time to hunt.
39
The Most Dangerous Predators Are the Smart Ones
Verena linked to the four sentinel towers, somehow sensing their various Builder parts more clearly than before. Was that because of what she’d just experienced, or just a side effect of greater focus forced upon her by the sight of hundreds of monsters already swarming past the towers?
Each of the sentinels acted as a remotely controlled siege weapon, similar in concept to the ones around the city, like the one being operated by Marwin. Frazier, the maze lord, had helped design the ingenious mechanicals. Instead of feeder tubes, all the ammunition was preloaded inside of each pedestal in a winding magazine built over powerful springs. Fully loaded with two hundred explosive rounds each, they were each capable of delivering devastating destruction upon any enemy foolish enough to close on Merkland.
Verena took a deep breath as the acceleration drums sped up. She activated a speakstone linked to the Albatross, high above the city. “This is Builder One. Status?”
Lady Briet answered. “Albatross here. We have engaged the flying swarm. Missiles and hornets do appear effective, but there are so many of them we’re increasing our attack rate. We will exhaust our ammunition long before we significantly damage this horde.”
“Do not return to the city to rearm. Keep your distance. Hopefully they’ll ignore you. I recommend you reserve some rounds in case we need close support.”
“Sculpted scone,” she acknowledged.
Verena grimaced. She really needed to talk with Hamish about that codeword.
The monsters were proving far more resourceful than the few they’d dispatched through the winter. Time to thin their ranks.
The leading edge of both the earthen swarm and the water swarm were already passing the sentinels. They had ignored the towers, so that offered some hope. If their mission was to destroy Merkland, maybe they would focus on destroying the wall and the buildings instead of the people. From their work with Jean’s summoned arm, she knew that commands needed to be specific, and miscommunication was easy.
All four weapons spooled up, and Verena grinned. It was a heady thing to control so much destruction with so little effort. Sometimes she worried how such an enormous power could be misused, but remotely activating weapons had saved her life at the battle of Merkland, and today she expected the mechanicals would save many more.
Each sentinel included a sighting reticle positioned just above the end of the barrel, but Verena did not need them. There were so many monsters, it would be impossible to miss. Even if she tried aiming straight up, she’d probably hit some of the flyers.
Verena activated all four Sentinels.
The deadly mechanicals began spewing destruction, and the highly explosive rounds blasted into the ranks of monsters on land and on the river. They produced instant and marvelous effects against the monsters on the land. Both earth-bound and fire-bound monsters disintegrated under the onslaught. Unfortunately, other fire-bound in the later ranks of the monsters seemed to absorb the flames from the explosions and only grow stronger.
Uh oh. They had not expected anything like that. There was nothing Verena could do about it though, and destroying all the earth-bound monsters would still give them a significant advantage so she kept the sentinels working.
The effects on the river were harder to judge. The sentinel tower in the river fired a different type of ammunition. Instead of high explosive rounds, it fired a penetrator round that could pierce deep into the water.
Many of the monsters remained underwater, while most of the monsters visible on the surface slipped beneath the waters when she opened fire. Verena could not tell if they were reforming, or dissipating. She wished Ivor could tell her if she was hurting them.
Then one of the views abruptly spun crazily. A second later it winked out.
“No!” Verena cried as she realized what was happening.
The monsters were attacking the sentinels.
She kept the others firing, but within seconds the other sentinels were ripped apart and she lost connection. She stared at the blank wall where the viewscreens had been for a moment, fighting a fresh wave of fear.
The monsters were smarter. They had sensed the danger and reacted to it.
She switched to viewscreens closer to the city to see the swarms closing to within half a mile. Kirstin’s Defense had slaughtered thousands of them, but hundreds more remained. And when she glanced upward, her heart sank. The sky was blackened by the largely unchallenged flying horde. That swarm was almost upon Merkland and would rain destruction from above upon the walls.
She activated a speakstone linked to all of the siege weapons placed around the city. “All units, prepare to engage.”
As a chorus of acknowledgments sounded in return she added, “Units seven through twelve along the river wall prepare your teams to repel water-bound invaders. The explosive rounds may work better once they leave the river, but units eight and eleven, I advise switching to harpoon penetrators.”
Even if they lacked time to switch over the ammunition before the first wave swarmed out of the river, they would fast exhaust the ammunition in the feeder tubes. They could then reload whatever rounds they needed. They might well exhaust every round available.
That was assuming all of the siege platforms remained operable and weren’t overrun, and that the reloading assistants were not killed.
No, she refused to think such negative thoughts. Verena switched to the command channel that was already buzzing with warnings from her team. “This is Verena. The sentinel towers are down. Preparing to transition mobile command to the Swift.”
“Any word from Ivor or Anton?” Rory asked immediately.
“Negative,” she said softly, the words catching in her throat. She hadn’t even had time to mourn their loss. She feared before the day ended the list of brave soldiers they needed to mourn would grow terrifyingly long.
Shona spoke, her voice strong, her tone confident. “All forces are ready. We will give them no quarter. Prepare to defend the walls!”
“We will hold,” Rory said with unshakable confidence. “We have to.”
Verena appreciated the boost to her courage his words offered. If they were going to fight an overwhelming foe, she was proud to fight them in such mighty company.
Verena rose from her command chair. She’d activated everything she could from there. She had to get up on the wall. As she scrambled up the ladder, she allowed herself to think of Connor and hope he reached the Mhortair before Queen Dreokt.
They had to hold the walls. She couldn’t imagine Connor returning victorious from ascending only to find Merkland a smashed ruin. She could not do that to him, could not leave him to face Queen Dreokt alone.
Verena reached the main floor of the Army gate just as every siege weapon began firing. In addition to the fast firing mechanicals, Merkland possessed a full complement of ballistae, catapults, and trebuchet. They fired much slower, but their huge missiles did tremendous damage, and the wall shook with the shuddering of heavy timbers as they delivered their deadly payloads.
The air thrummed with the rapid-fire whooshing sound of the siege mechanicals spitting projectiles and the staccato thunder of detonations. Soldiers were shouting and pointing, while reloading crews moved new ammunition into place as fast as they could move.
The swarm of earth and fire-bound monsters was pouring up the gently curving road, and the rain of destruction smashed into them with awesome force. Explosions rent lumbering monsters to pieces, but the swarm swallowed up the dead without seeming diminished, and more monsters poured over the remains, unhindered.
Other monsters were leaping straight up the cliff and walls of Merkland, tearing into hardened granite with claws strong enough to pierce the reinforced stone. Flames billowed up in vast clouds toward the defenders, and the air spiked twenty degrees hotter.
Flameweavers and Firetongues deflected the fires and worked to seize the flames from the monsters, while Spitters swept creatures from the wall with long, whipping tendrils of silvery liquid.
The ground outside rumbled, and grasping tendrils of earth shot up to trip monsters and rip them to pieces. As the swarm clawed through opposition toward the gate, Verena frowned. Their Sentries did not seem to be causing nearly enough damage. She spotted one weird, whip-thin monster that looked like a wolf’s shadow somehow slip through grasping fingers of earth without damage.
The bank of speakstones behind her in the tower was squawking with officers shouting warnings of some kind of shielding blocking Petralist efforts.
“Tallan preserve us,” Verena whispered as she stared down at the seething mass of wildly charging monsters. Their eyes glowed red with flame or stared with dead, black earthen pupils, hungry for blood.
The cacophony of shouting soldiers and howling monsters, crackling fires and hissing steam intensified as the swarm charged the last fifty yards toward the wall right at Army gate.
“Brace!” General Rory shouted from his position a little way down the wall, flanked by Anika and a full contingent of Fast Rollers and Crushers. Erich was grinning, and it looked like Tomas and Cameron were betting on something as they prepared for an epic fight.
To her left, along the southernmost tip of the wall, the first monsters reached the top. A sinewy monster, like a long snake, its earthen body eight feet in diameter, propelled by a dozen short, powerful legs, flowed up over the wall. Its huge jaws gaped open impossibly wide and it lunged at the company of plate-armored Boulders stationed there, already charging to repel it.
And with blood and steel and fury, the battle for the wall was joined.
40
When the Best-laid Plans Don’t Account for a Swarm
A wave of nightmare creatures clawed and tore their way up Merkland’s famous walls. Tertiary Petralists battered dozens of them down, but more scrambled past even as the front ranks of monsters fell. Verena feared there were simply too many, coming too fast.
Siege weapons fired a continuous stream of destruction down into the mass of summoned monsters, but the hundreds of explosions seemed to do nothing to thin the horde. Verena stood at one of the widows in the Army gate tower and stared, dumbstruck by the incredible ferocity of the swarm.
Somehow it seemed as if more of the monsters remained than she thought. Was that possible? Could the queen be regenerating them somehow?
She didn’t think so, but there was no time to think. The wave of monsters was all consuming, a tide of destruction and terror, heat and howling fangs.
Verena switched to the siege weapon operators channel. Operators were shouting reports, many sounding awed or nearly panicked. Water-bound monsters were swarming up the eastern wall too, and the siege weapons had less effect against them.
She shouted, “Units along the river, aim for the monsters’ heads. Might have better luck. Everyone else, change focus to clearing the top of the wall. Give the defenders support!”
Instantly Marwin pivoted his siege weapon. He couldn’t shoot straight down, but could angle his fire downward to help the soldiers near the Lord gate. He fired explosive rounds perilously close over the heads of soldiers fighting monsters nearby, targeting creatures clambering up the wall to their south.
Ballistae began casting enormous spears and exploding missiles at point blank range, almost straight down, but it was not enough.
A huge creature, like a giant torc, but ringed in flames, boiled up over the wall about a hundred yards away from Verena, and its legs split open, spraying fire over the soldiers rushing in to fight it. They fell back, some screaming, but others activating personal shielding devices.
Verena breathed a sigh of relief, even though she felt so tense it was hard to breathe. Those personal defensive mechanicals might prove critical in helping turn the tide in their favor.
A Firetongue swept the monster’s flames away a second later, and the Boulders charged in, smashing the creature apart.
It exploded.
The shockwave knocked soldiers flying and cleared a section of wall for several smaller monsters to scramble up and leap upon the disoriented defenders. The fighting was vicious and close, and Verena felt an overriding need to do something to help.
She clutched at her satchel, but the stones in there weren’t powerful enough. Through a piece of quickened sculpted obsidian in her glove, she connected with the Swift and activated its thrusters.
She wore the battle armor that Connor loved so much, with her sword and throwing daggers belted on her waist, and her satchel filled to bursting with deadly mechanicals. Against any human foes, Verena would feel confident, and she hated how helpless she felt in the face of that swarm.
In the Swift, she could fight them as an equal.
As she remotely piloted her deadly personal craft up from the courtyard below, where she’d left it hovering, she calculated the best ways to use her armament of weapons to support the intense struggle.
In that moment, the sun darkened as the flying swarm blackened the sky over Merkland and dove at the city. Scores of monsters slammed into the glowing dome of the shield, and it shook under the tremendous force. Other airborne monsters swept along the walls, raking at exposed soldiers with tooth and claw.
The men and w
omen of Merkland responded with barrages of slung stones and with handheld speedslings. The explosive rounds traced the paths of the monsters targeted by the deadly streams of hornets, ripping out chunks of flesh, and tearing off limbs.
The rapid-fire mechanicals took up the fight, targeting the flying monsters swarming around the shield, battering it relentlessly. Unless they could drive off those monsters quickly, the shield would not survive very long.
All of that force battering it drew deeper and deeper from the quartzite stones powering the shield. The massive construct consumed enormous amounts of power already, despite the incredible advances they had made in fine-tuning the shapes of the cut stones to magnify the resulting power and reduce drain.
Verena watched carefully as the siege weapons tracked the monsters, pouring explosive rounds up into the sky. With a growing sense of dread, she realized they would fail.
At that close range, with the monsters zipping back and forth, banking hard, and plunging down toward the exposed soldiers on the wall, the rapid-fire mechanicals were just too slow. There were hundreds of flying monsters, so they hit some, but not nearly enough.
The operators were already shouting to each other to try leading the monsters to get a hit, but that was extremely difficult. The monsters shifted flight paths so fast it was almost like they anticipated the rounds.
It was a bad time for the distraction of the flying swarm. With defenders and siege weapons turning to fight them off, the land-bound swarm attacked again. A new wave of terrible creatures swept up onto the wall. For a moment it looked like the defenders would be totally overrun.
“Reinforcements!” Verena shouted into the officer channel.
As more soldiers pounded up stairs to assist, the Sentries responded. They might have struggled to fight off the earth-bound swarm through their shielding, but now they were on home turf.