by Frank Morin
“How did she do that?” he asked as he accelerated toward the hovering windrider. He hadn’t seen her down there, but the ruse actually made sense.
“Clever shielding tricks. I’m coming. Verena and Mattias will support me while I intercept Harley.”
“Alone?” Hamish exclaimed. He’d seen Kilian in action, but standing in front of an entire army led by Harley was a bit ambitious, even for him.
“That’s all we’ve got until Connor gets the city calmed down. Rory and his company have their own jobs. Ivor will support them and me, as needed. I’m leaving Ilse and the Crushers to guard the main road. I can’t imagine Harley doesn’t have plans to send in the rest of the army once we’re committed. Your job is to support Ilse when Harley springs that next phase on us.”
Hamish muttered a curse as he landed on the windrider, hovering over a thousand feet above the southern edge of the city. His huge, spherical armor, covered in a dusting of fresh snow, loomed in the oversized wagon bed. They’d hoped to divide and distract Harley, but she’d done it to them instead.
“I’ll maintain watch from here. If you run into trouble, I’ll help you. If something hits Ilse first, I’ll help her.”
“Very well. I’m heading across the river now.”
A new note of predatory anticipation had crept into his voice. When Hamish looked down toward the bridge over the Macantact, connecting the southern end of the township to the road encircling the city, he easily spotted Kilian.
All pretense gone, Kilian skated over the river, twenty feet in the air, ringed in orange and red flames, sliding across glittering, icy pavement that materialized in front of him and faded back to falling snow behind.
Hamish suddenly felt more optimistic.
Kilian was going to war.
He was glad his name wasn’t Harley.
Jean crouched in the snow beside a towering maple tree, so like the ones she loved outside of Alasdair. There, among the trees at the border of the hills four miles south of Merkland, the storm seemed far less intense.
Trees creaked under the occasional gusts, and fat flakes of snow drifted down all around, making that peculiar, barely audible hissing sound unique to snowstorms. The cold air bit at her nose and cheeks, but she felt warm. Anticipation accelerated her heart rate and flushed her with energy.
Rory’s strike force crouched along the tree line to either side. Aifric waited near Jean. Rory and Anika stood arm in arm next to her, while Erich, Tomas, and Cameron stood a little farther back in the shadow of an oak tree.
They all looked as anxious as she felt. Ivor had been providing updates, and Rory had nearly ordered the entire command to run for Merkland to try to help, but Ivor had explained that Connor had a plan to save the city.
She was already lifting her mini-hub to her mouth to ask Ivor for an update when his voice echoed up into the silence.
“Start your advance. Kilian is moving to intercept Harley and a large host we just discovered on the eastern shore. Connor’s trying to help the city. Ilse is covering the main road.”
Rory turned to one of the Spitters, a senior officer with plenty of gray in his beard. “Talk to me.”
“The army’s not scanning in this direction any more. We’ve held careful shields with slate and soapstone. I don’t think they know we’re here, and they’re definitely not acting like they expect to get hit on the flanks.”
“Move out then,” Rory ordered.
Taking Anika’s hand, Rory led the way out of the trees. Jean felt a rush of anticipation as she followed them into the open. Several soldiers carrying large packs full of mechanicals followed her. They really were going to attack an army more than fifty times bigger.
Soldiers all down the lines moved when Rory did, without the need for verbal commands. They emerged silently from the tree line, along the first row of hills, over a quarter mile west of the main road to Merkland. The soldiers looked like dark wraiths through the snow and the morning gloom. Jean walked close beside Aifric, who flashed an eager grin.
“Aifric, keep us quiet,” Rory ordered.
“Already on it, General,” she said in Student Eighteen’s voice. Jean hoped to find time to meet all of her fascinating personalities and delve deeper into how she crammed so many women into that single head.
As the army advanced, they broke into four-man squads. Tertiary Petralists were sprinkled down the ranks, each supporting several squads. With so much snow in the air and on the ground, the Spitter officer assured Rory they were maintaining an excellent shield against both Sentries and enemy Spitters.
“Just get us close,” Rory said softly, his voice like the scraping of pebbles in a receding tide.
The Spitter saluted but did not speak. Silence was of paramount importance, even with Student Eighteen snatching the little sounds they made.
Anika gave Rory a quick kiss, then trotted ahead to join Erich and a couple Crushers. Tomas and Cameron moved up as well, with a couple of Fast Rollers flanking them.
Jean found it hard to breathe as they slipped through the gray morning like ghosts in the snow. She clutched a satchel filled with her healing supplies, her precious keystone, and special tonics she’d worked up for the stealth assault.
If the plan worked, they could distract the entire enormous army long enough for Kilian and Connor and the others to defeat Harley.
If it failed, they could get surrounded. Everyone else was committed, so no one could come to the rescue.
86
Bad Guys Aren’t Supposed to Be Clever, Too
Hamish scrambled into the entrance tunnel of the Juggernaut and activated a bit of limestone. Its soft, green-tinted light made the marvelous mechanical seem wonderfully sinister.
He patted the heavy steel plates and quickened granite slabs that formed the outer skin. Each plate was octagonal-shaped, fitted closely together in an alternating pattern of steel and granite, forming an extremely durable barrier. He briefly inspected the weapons, thrusters, and other components on their racks behind the plates. Everything looked just as ready as the last time he checked it before dawn, and he allowed a grim smile of anticipation.
Let Harley come.
The Juggernaut smelled of steel and stone, oil and dust, leather mingled with the fresh scent of quartzite. He breathed deep and allowed himself a moment to simply feel it.
He loved the Juggernaut. It was an engineering marvel. As he crawled through his access tunnel past a long, sharp drill to his left and battering-ram arm on his right, he paused to touch the top of the furnace and activate the marble inset into that lid. The furnace rumbled as the fire inside began to build pressure to power the many massive components.
Then he climbed into the pilot chamber at the heart of the armor. After those long days of practice in Faulenrost, it took only seconds to secure all of the straps that held him suspended in the center. He firmly believed the Juggernaut was ready to withstand brutal damage. He double-checked the brass casters that secured his harness to the hull, making sure they’d roll unhindered through their complex array of iron tubing.
Hamish gripped a pair of control handles, set with pieces of sculpted obsidian that Gisela had crafted for that purpose. They’d never equal one of Ailsa’s finished pieces, but they didn’t need to. They acted as the lynch pins that allowed the Juggernaut to work.
He opened the release rate on those sculpted obsidian stones just a fraction, and the Juggernaut came alive in his mind. No longer simply an external framework, the armor became part of him. The outer hull was like an extension of his own skin, the many weapons and components like fingers, flexed and ready to punch. Hamish flicked his Builder senses across everything, linking to them through tiny pieces of obsidian connected to each one.
With a thought, he activated a couple of sightstones. His visor shimmered, then two separate views of the outside appeared. The forward-facing one took up the top half of his visor, while the backward-looking one took the bottom. He could activate others if needed, but viewing
too many at once still gave him a headache.
Those sightstones looked out over the gently falling snow to either side of the windrider. That wasn’t terribly helpful, so he activated a lever that drew upon the power building in the furnace to roll the Juggernaut to the edge of the long, flat bed of the windrider. The movement tipped the view downward and he immediately spotted Kilian.
The Dawnus had reached the road near the southern edge of the township. He and Mattias faced over a hundred soldiers about a hundred yards away, with a billowing wall of flames between them, across the road. Those soldiers broke into a charge.
Kilian was going to need Hamish’s help.
He rotated the Juggernaut and found Ilse and Lukas moving cautiously south along the wide Crann highway. They’d just about reached the southern end of the long, elevated speedcaravan bridge that rose up from the ground near their position and extended up to the bluff. The Crushers flanked them on either side, their small squads keeping fifty yards apart.
They looked fine. Hamish activated the speakstone paired with one on Ilse’s mini-hub to warn her of his plans.
The ground directly beneath Ilse and Lukas erupted in a huge explosion of dirt, sending the two flying. Hamish blinked in surprise and instant fear. He’d never seen Ilse thrown around by earth. Then the same thick-bodied, earthen serpent with the elfonnel head that tried to eat Lukas before erupted from the ground, massive jaws gaping wide.
Crushers swarmed in toward the unexpected attack, but their dispersed grouping worked against them that time. They needed several seconds to react and close on the monster.
They didn’t have that much time.
Lukas rolled to his feet, several yards away from Ilse, whose hands were already buried back into the earth. He drew a heavy mace and lunged at the earthen beast, clearly trying to keep it distracted until Ilse could dispatch it.
Whatever she tired, it wasn’t enough.
The hideous monster lunged at Lukas, its massive jaws gaping wide. He struck a mighty blow with his mace, snapping off one enormous fang, and knocking its entire head away.
“Kill it, Lukas!” Hamish shouted, even though he didn’t have a speakstone connection.
Then his glee evaporated as the serpentlike monster whipped its massive tail around at Ilse. She raised a hand, and Hamish shouted again with victory as the beast’s heavy body split, two massive pieces tumbling past either side of Ilse. But then he noticed two details that cut his victory cry into a joked shout of warning.
Ilse looked surprised by the monster’s sudden splitting.
And Hamish saw no blood, no spray of elements released.
Those two broken pieces of serpent abruptly stopped moving, transformed into huge blocks of earth, and slammed together, with Ilse caught in the middle. She tried throwing herself clear with a burst of earth.
She almost made it.
The blocks smashed together with terrific force, catching Ilse’s hips and legs between them. She screamed again, this time in pure agony.
Lukas shouted a furious battle cry and struck the monster’s back. Its flexible body coiled, then struck like a cobra, catching him in the ribs and tumbling him away.
Things were happening too fast. Hamish couldn’t believe what he was seeing, but one thing was abundantly clear. They needed him far more than Kilian did.
The Juggernaut pitched off the windrider before he realized he’d willed it to move, and huge quartzite thrusters ignited, blasting it downward like an enormous stone from the world’s biggest catapult.
Harley rose out of the ground as her mini-elfonnel serpent dove down into the earth, then re-emerged onto the road beside her, looking whole and undamaged. Twelve legs sprouted from its belly and it lunged toward the charging Crushers with astonishing speed.
Those soldiers didn’t flinch, didn’t show any fear, but reacted with instincts honed from years of training and dangerous missions. Fire and water struck at the monster’s face while Striders raced around it, striking at the joints of its legs.
The Boulders couldn’t move fast enough. It reached the first squad and consumed two Boulders, even though the valiant pair smashed at its jagged teeth and darting tongues with fortified hammers. Their blood sprayed wide across the snow, and Hamish was glad he couldn’t hear their cries.
He accelerated. The Juggernaut tore down toward Harley, who stood on the roadway, watching the carnage. He raged at how high he’d been hovering. It was taking him precious seconds too long.
The mini-elfonnel snapped its long, whiplike tail to the side, catching a Strider and shattering the man’s ribs. He fell tumbling, and the creature leaped upon him, gobbling him up in an eyeblink. Then it turned toward the Spitter and Firetongue, who were attacking it viciously, but with no apparent success.
Lukas charged in, alone, mace held high in both hands, shouting defiance. The monster turned toward him and he delivered another mighty blow, slamming it across the head hard enough to shatter stone, beating its head into the ground.
That blow should have broken something, but somehow it didn’t. The monster knocked Lukas stumbling back a step, opened its enormous maw wide, and struck.
Lukas raised his weapon to strike, but moved a fraction of a second too slow. The monster snapped that huge maw around Lukas with terrific force. Hamish cried out in horror as the monster crushed out Lukas’s life in a single powerful bite. Blood sprayed across the snow and Lukas’s death cry echoed through his helmet, along with Ilse’s scream of horrified denial.
Hamish blinked, trying to believe what he’d seen. How could Lukas be gone so fast, so brutally? If Ilse hadn’t been so badly injured, she would have saved him. It was a miracle she was still conscious.
Harley turned toward Ilse and bore down upon her where she lay on the ground, still screaming, her legs and hips clearly broken, crying Lukas’s name.
“You demon spawn,” Ilse cried between sobs. “I’ll rip out your heart.”
Harley laughed and grabbed Ilse by the throat. Ilse’s speakstone picked up her voice, passing it to Hamish. “I promised no quarter, fool. You’re going to die slowly, with a perfect understanding of what it means to anger me.”
Ilse gasped. “You’re healing me?”
“Just enough to keep you alive and less distracted by your own problems so you can enjoy watching what happens to the fools who follow you.”
She dropped Ilse to the ground and walked a few paces toward the mini-elfonnel, which was devouring another Strider. One Water Moccasin was spearing at the monster’s eyes with spears of ice. Harley raised her hand, and spikes of earth erupted from the ground all around that Water Moccasin, driving in at the surprised woman. She convulsed under the onslaught, falling limp over the blood-soaked spears that propped her off the ground.
The Flameweaver, a stocky veteran with graying, brown hair, erupted into the air before he could be similarly speared.
Ilse screamed again with rage and tried dragging herself toward Harley.
Hamish reached her first.
He fired an enormous puking doom just before impact to slow his descent enough to not destroy the Juggernaut. Harley glanced up just in time to take the full ferocity of those flames full in the face.
Then the Juggernaut slammed down onto her head, crushing her down into the ground so hard that the armor drove two feet into the frozen earth after her.
The impact brutally jarred Hamish, despite the protection of his suspended harness, which stretched under the incredible force but couldn’t absorb all the shock. He bounced and rattled so hard he strained his neck, and all the breath exploded from his lungs.
The armor didn’t crumple, though. The spherical design helped dissipate the impact remarkably well, although the support girders thrummed and flexed under the strain.
Still blinking dizziness from the sudden stop, Hamish rolled the Juggernaut out of the hole and activated another sightstone, expecting to see only a splattered smear of blood where Harley had stood.
She wasn
’t there.
The mini-elfonnel had collapsed into a pile of dirt nearby, but Harley was gone.
“Tallan’s ugly grandmother,” he muttered and rolled the Juggernaut abruptly to the side.
Just in time. A pillar shot up out of the ground, right where he’d just been. Harley stepped out of the pillar, face bloody, her entire right side looking broken. That arm hung limp, while a bone of that leg jutted out through the flesh of her thigh.
“Oh, I’m grouted,” Hamish muttered. She should not be alive, should not be standing.
Hamish activated a long drill, planning to drive it into her chest and rip her to pieces. Before the drill could even spin up, or the outer hull plate slide aside, the ground under the Juggernaut buckled, sending it rolling aside. He activated thrusters, accelerating, and shifting to other sightstones to keep Harley in view as he rolled in a circle around her.
She ignored him, but grabbed her leg with fingers of earth and pulled, extending the leg and sliding the bone back into position. She never screamed, didn’t even flinch.
In fact, she just looked annoyed.
As Hamish circled around for another attack, he activated a speakstone so she could hear him. “Hey, psycho hag lady, at your age you should take up knitting or something less strenuous than world conquest.”
He activated pumice, ready to take a huge hit.
Instead, the ground fell away beneath the Juggernaut into a huge pit, lined with spikes.
With thrusters already active, he quickly increased the release rate. Although the huge weight settled a foot into the pit before the blasting air caught it and threw it into the air again. He added rear thrusters, aiming for Harley’s head again.
This time earth rose up in grasping fingers to catch him. With pumice activated, he slid right through.
Harley looked surprised.
Hamish activated a battering ram. The steel plate at the front of the Juggernaut snapped aside and the quartzite-driven steel ram erupted out the gap. It caught Harley in the chest and Hamish clearly heard breaking bones.