‘You have women,’ the bandit leader noted. ‘Roach-kinden, isn’t it?’
Sfayot regarded him narrowly, waiting.
‘You sing, dance? Anything? Only I remember your lot as being musical.’
Sfayot nodded slowly.
‘Well then we’ll deal,’ the bandit leader decided. ‘We have a commodity for trade: safe passage on this road. In return, you’ll trade us some entertainment. And we’ll break our bread together, or whatever you can find. And then we’ll decide what we’re going to do with you.’
Twenty-Eight
The morning began bright and cloudless, and Stenwold had the dubious pleasure of being able to see it. Balkus had kicked at his door an hour before dawn, and then carried on kicking until Stenwold had arisen.
Now he was in his temporary base in the harbourmaster’s office, the harbourmaster himself having taken ship at the first word of the Vekken advance. Around him were his artificers, his messengers, and a fair quantity of others whose purpose and disposition he had no ideas about. Balkus stood at his shoulder like some personification of war, his nailbow in plain view, and Stenwold tried to imagine what would happen when the naval attack actually took place.
The harbour at Collegium had been designed to be defended. There was a stubby sea-wall sheltering it, and the two towers flanking the harbour entrance held some serviceable artillery, if not particularly up to date. There was a chain slung between these towers, currently hanging well below any ship’s draft, that would serve when raised to prevent a vessel crossing that gateway, or that was the theory. Defence had been a priority in the minds of the architects, certainly, but they had lived two centuries ago, and had never heard of armourclads, or even of ships that moved by the power of engines rather than under sail or with banks of oars. Since then, defence had been a long way from anyone’s mind right up until the Vekken had turned up with a fleet.
Out-thought by Ant-kinden, he cursed to himself, trying to find some gem of an idea that might save the day. If the Vekken could land their troops, those superbly efficient paragons of Ant-kinden training, then the docks would be lost in half an hour, and the city in just a day.
‘They’re moving!’
The shout roused Stenwold from his ruminations. He rushed over to the expansive window of the harbourmaster’s office and saw that the funnels of the armourclads had now started to fume in earnest. Four smaller vessels were beginning to make headway towards the harbour, whilst the huge flagship had begun to come around with ponderous but irresistible motion. The small ships of the fleet began to tack around it, some by engine power and a few by sail.
‘Is the artillery ready?’ Stenwold demanded. ‘Where’s Cabre?’
‘Gone to get the artillery ready,’ said one of the soldiers with him. ‘It’s in hand, Master Maker. All you need to do is sit here and watch.’
‘No,’ muttered Stenwold, because he had to do something, and yet what was there to do? ‘Master Greatly, is he.?’
‘He said that he was ready, although I don’t believe a word of it,’ said one of his artificers, the man with the underwater explosives. ‘He did say you could go and watch the launch if you wanted.’
‘Yes, I do want,’ Stenwold decided. He looked around for Balkus. ‘Where’s.?’
There was a dull thump from quite close by, and he felt the floorboards shudder. For a mad second he was two decades younger and in the city of Myna, with the Wasps’ ramming engine at the gates.
‘What was that?’ he demanded, but nobody knew, so he rushed to the window and saw three buildings away a warehouse burning merrily, its front staved in.
‘Sabotage!’ someone shouted and, even in the moment that Stenwold was wondering coolly who would sabotage a warehouse, a second missile was lobbed from the great Vekken flagship. It flew in a shallow, burning arc, and it seemed impossible that it would not just drop into the water, but their range was accurate, and in the next moment another of the dockside buildings had exploded.
Most of the Collegium dockside was wood, Stenwold realized dully, and then, They must be sighting for our artillery. There was only a brief stretch of sea-wall at Collegium, but the two stubby towers that projected were already launching flaming ballista bolts and catapult stones towards the approaching armourclads, sizing up the distance. The siege engines on the Vekken flagship must be enormous, though, the entire vessel a floating siege platform. Collegium’s harbour defences could not hope to match the range.
Something flashed overhead, and Stenwold saw a heliopter cornering madly through the smoke. It was a civilian machine, some merchant’s prized cargo carrier, but its pilot was putting it through manoeuvres its designer had never anticipated. Behind it barrelled a sleek fixed-wing flier, propellers buzzing, and then a heavy Helleron-made orthopter painted clumsily with a golden scarab device. The airfield had begun to launch its defences. He should go and see how Master Greatly was doing.
And someone called, ‘Look out!’
He turned, idiotically, towards the window, just in time to see the whole wall in front of him explode. The incendiary blast hurled him away in a raking of splinters, knocking everyone else off their feet. He hit his own map-table, smashed it with his weight, and a wall of heat passed over him. He could hear himself shouting out some order, but he had no idea what.
Then he was being helped to his feet, and for a moment he could not see, and his face and shoulder were one mass of pain.
‘What’s.? Who’s.?’
‘Steady there.’ The voice was Balkus’s but there was a lot of other noise, too — the crackling of flames, the cries of the wounded. He let Balkus guide him blindly away and prop him against a wall.
‘Now hold still,’ the Ant said. People kept running past, jostling him, and he felt stabs of pain as Balkus plucked the worst of the splinters from him. He wiped his face, feeling blood slick on his hand. The injured were still being hauled from the harbourmaster’s office, even as the room burned.
‘Is everyone.?’ he started, and then realized: ‘The fleet! Is the chain up?’
‘No idea,’ Balkus said, and Stenwold staggered away, thumping down the stairs with blood seeping into his eyes again, and Balkus trying to keep up. From somewhere there was another explosion, another flaming missile from the Vekken flagship.
He staggered out into the clearer air, that was nevertheless blotched and stinking with smoke, onto the flat open quayside. Ahead of him was the calm stretch of the harbour, and the two stubby walls with their artillery towers, with the great open space of water between them.
Only it was open no longer, for the first ships of the Vekken navy were fast crowding into it. Three of the armourclads were powering forwards, and he could hear above all of it the thump of their heavy engines. To either side of them, wooden craft knifed through the water, coursing ahead of the cumbersome metal-hulled vessels, their catapults and ballistae launching up at the harbour towers.
The towers were loosing back, however and Stenwold saw one skiff swamped by a direct hit from a leadshotter, its wooden hull simply folding in the middle, the mast toppling sideways. The men that fell from its sides were armoured Vekken soldiers, as were most of the crews of the approaching navy, and Stenwold thought they must be mad to dare a sea assault.
And yet here they came, and the chain was still nowhere to be seen.
‘Raise it!’ he shouted, with no hope of being heard across that expanse of water, amongst such commotion. ‘The chain! Raise the chain!’
Beside him Balkus was slotting a magazine into his nailbow, which at this distance was as futile as Stenwold’s own shouting. By the time the weapon would mean anything, it would be too late.
And then Stenwold saw a gleam in the water as something was cranked up from the seabed: the great spiked chain that closed off the harbour mouth. There were engines three storeys high in the paired towers to drag the great weight of metal through the water, but they were engines fifty years old. Here it came, though, and Stenwold ground his teeth
in agony as it seemed that the powering armourclads would be past it before it was up in place. They were bigger ships than he had thought, though, and further away, but the fleetest of the wooden vessels now surged forwards, trying to cross the barrier before it was finally raised.
The chain caught the ship before a quarter of its length had passed, and it abruptly began rising with it in a splintering of wood. The spikes on the chain were busy rotating, each set in opposition to the next one, chewing and biting into the vessel’s hull even as its bows were lifted entirely out of the water. Then the craft began to tip, spilling men out, even as its engine mindlessly pushed it further over the chain. A moment later it slid back, entirely heeling onto its side, to lie awash in the water directly in the path of the armourclads.
‘Nice work!’ Balkus exclaimed. Stenwold shook his head.
‘They didn’t even have armourclads when that chain was made. There’s no telling whether it will stop them.’
Out there, the cargo heliopter he had seen earlier was veering over the armourclads, and he saw it rock under the impact of artillery fire, half falling from the sky and then clawing its way back up. The Helleron orthopter was turning on its wingtip, and a man at its hatch was simply tipping a crateful of grenades out to scatter over ships and sea alike, exploding in bright flashes wherever they struck wood or metal. A moment later one of the flier’s flapping wings was on fire, the orthopter’s turn pitching into a dive. Stenwold looked away.
‘Master Maker!’ Stenwold turned at his name to see Joyless Greatly and a group of other Beetle-kinden lumbering towards him. They lumbered because they were wearing some sort of ugly-looking armour, great bronze blocks bolted to their chests, and man-length shields on their backs.
‘Ready for action, Master Maker.’ Greatly was grinning madly.
‘You said you had orthopters!’ Stenwold shouted at him. ‘Where are they?’
‘We’re wearing them, Master Maker.’ Joyless Greatly turned briefly, and Stenwold saw now that his back resembled a beetle’s, with curved and rigid wingcases, elytra that almost brushed the stone of the quay.
The block weighting his chest was an engine, Stenwold realized, and it must have been a real triumph of artifice to make it that small. There were explosives hanging from it, too, on quick-release catches. The expression on Greatly’s face was quite insane.
‘Good luck,’ Stenwold wished him — these being insane times.
Greatly gripped a ring on his engine and yanked at it, twice and then three times, and suddenly it shouted into life. Stenwold fell back as the wingcases on his back opened up, revealing translucent wings beneath, and then both wings and cases were powering up, first slowly but gradually threshing themselves into a blur.
And Joyless Greatly was airborne, his feet leaving the quay and, beyond him, the score of his cadre were up as well.
Beetles flew like stones, so the saying went, but Greatly had overcome both nature and Art. His wings sang through the air and sent him hurtling out across the water, utterly fearless and weaving for height, until he became just a dangling dot heading towards the oncoming bulks of the armourclads, which had reached the chain.
The sky above them was busy now, as the airfield sent out its fliers one after another to attack the encroaching fleet. Airships wobbled slowly overhead and dropped explosives and grenades or simply stones and crates, while orthopters swooped with ponderous dignity. There were fixed-wings making their rapid passes over the oblivious ships and loosing their ballistae, or with their pilots simply leaning out with crossbows. Stenwold felt his stomach lurch at the thought, but there were men and women out there, Fly-kinden mostly, but a Moth here, a Mantis there, even a clumsy Beetle-kinden, all darting with Art-given wings, shooting at the Ant sailors and soldiers and being shot at in turn. The air that Joyless Greatly and his men were entering was a frenzy of crossbow bolts and artillery, of sudden fiery explosions and scattershot.
The lead armourclad now struck the capsized wooden ship and crushed it against the chain, forcing it half-over and then shearing through the planks until it itself met the grinding teeth of the chain. They scraped and screamed as they hit the metal, scratching at it but unable to bite. For a second Stenwold thought the ship would be lifted up by it, but its draft was too deep, and its engines kept urging it forwards. Explosive bolts from the tower artillery burst about its hull in brief flares, and then one of the towers was enveloped in a firestorm as the flagship found its range. The tower was still shooting, even though some of its slit windows leaked flame.
And the armourclad strained, and for a second its stern was coming around as the chain stretched taut, but then a link parted somewhere and the chain flew apart in a shrapnel of broken metal and the armourclad’s bow leapt forwards, making the entire ship shudder.
There was now nothing between it and the harbour. Stenwold knew he should move, but he could not. He just stared at the black metal ship as its unstoppable engines thrust it forwards. The repeating ballista mounted at its bows was swivelling to launch blazing bolts at the buildings nearest. Meanwhile another missile struck the east tower and caved a section of it in.
Impossibly small over its mighty decks, the miniature orthopters of Joyless Greatly swung hither and thither like a cloud of gnats. They had the swift power of a flying machine but the nimble size of a flying man, and Stenwold saw them dart and spin about the deck of the armourclad with their artificial wings blurring, releasing explosives one by one from their engine harnesses.
The cargo heliopter shuddered past, trailing smoke now, a trail of incendiaries falling behind it that were mostly swallowed by the sea. Stenwold longed for the telescope he had at Myna, but he had not even thought to bring one. He strained his eyes to see one of Greatly’s men dodge and tilt over the armourclad’s deck, leaving a trail of fire behind him.
‘Will you look at that!’ shouted Balkus, pointing. Stenwold followed the direction of his finger to see something glint beneath the surface of the harbour.
‘Tseitus’s submersible ship!’ he exclaimed. He had expected something like a fish, but jetting out from beneath the quay came a silvery, flattened oval as long as three men laid end to end, with six great powering paddles that forced it through the water in uneven jerks. It was fast, though, for with half a dozen of those laborious strokes it was most of the way to the armourclads. He lost sight of the submersible as it passed beneath the lead ship.
‘Everything we have,’ he heard himself say. ‘It must surely be enough.’
There was a spectacular explosion of fire and stone, and the east tower simply flew apart, some strike of the flagship having found its ammunition store. The flying debris battered the nearest armourclad, rolling it violently so that its starboard rail was almost under water. With a dozen great dents in its side, it began to drift towards the shattered tower, its engine still running but its rudder ruined.
Cabre had been in that tower, Stenwold recalled. He suddenly felt ill.
The lead armourclad was still forging forwards but it was on fire in a dozen places from Greatly’s ministrations. Even as he watched, Stenwold saw one of the diminutive fliers hover neatly by its main funnel. It was too far to see the descent of the bombs, but a moment later there was a cavernous bang from within the vessel, and the funnel’s smoke doubled, and redoubled. The flier was already skimming away, and the others were leaving too, making all ways from the stricken ship. Stenwold saw at least one of them falter and fall to the Vekken crossbowmen, spiralling over and over, out of control, until the water received him.
Balkus grabbed Stenwold and threw him to the quayside, more roughly than necessary, and then the stones beneath him jumped hard enough to throw him upwards an inch and smack the breath from him when he came down.
A single piece of jagged metal was thrown far enough to clatter onto the docks, but the centre of the lead armourclad had exploded into a twisted sculpture of ruined metal and burning wood that clogged the mouth of the harbour. Beyond it, through a curta
in of smoke, Stenwold could dimly see other ships of the fleet making ponderous turns, still under attack from the air. One of them was listing already, its wooden hull holed beneath the waterline in what must have been Tseitus’s blow for Collegium.
The fliers began to return home, and there seemed so very few.
The powerfully-built Fly-kinden stepped from the dockside house, watching the ships retreat, his vantage a slice of sea and sky viewed down a narrow back alley. ‘I want my money back,’ said the treasure-hunter Kori to the women behind him.
‘Go to the wastes!’ the Madam spat at him. ‘You filthy little monster!’
He leered at her, lounging in the doorway, oblivious to the smoke on the air. ‘Come, now, the world’s about to end isn’t it?’ he demanded. ‘The city’s about to fall. Your ladies should be giving it out free, just for the joy of their profession. I’d thought I’d find some proper dedication to your trade here, in this city of learning.’
The old Beetle woman regarded him venomously but said nothing. Kori laughed at her. ‘Instead, what is there? The moment a little disturbance happens, and four streets away mind, all your girls lose their nerve and start crying and whimpering and begging for their lives. I mean, it’s not that I don’t enjoy that sort of thing but, still, if they won’t perform, what is there? The trade’s fallen into a sad state. It’s no wonder they call this a house of ill repute.’
‘You brute!’ the old woman said. ‘This is our home, our city! We can’t all just fly away through the air when the walls come down.’
‘Well, exactly,’ the Fly agreed. ‘But will you make the best of it? No, you will not. You could have had a few coins from me, woman, and they might have stood you in good stead. I’m sure there’s a Vekken Ant with a venal soul somewhere out there. My ardour has cooled though, so my purse remains shut. I leave you only with my own disappointment.’
He walked away from them, whistling jauntily against the misery of the city around him. He felt it incumbent upon him to at least keep his own spirits up. So Collegium was on the rocks these days. That was no business of his. Let the Ants and the Beetles sort their own lives out, so long as he got what he came for.
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