I switched lines. “Kithuun-Barda!”
The Irchtani commander’s voice croaked in my ear. “Lord?”
“Don’t let the Cielcin take those guns!”
“We see them!” he said. “They’re climbing with their bare hands! These are not Cielcin.”
“They’re chimeras,” I said. “Udax and I killed one in our last battle.”
“There are many more than one,” the kithuun answered.
I clenched my jaw. “I’m coming to you.”
Pallino, who had heard that much at least from where he stood beside me, said, “You should stay here, Had! Let me go.”
“No!” I shouted. “We’ve waited long enough. The lower city’s overrun. If we lose those guns we’ll have them knocking on the Storm Wall gates in half an hour. We’re going.”
The old myrmidon paused a moment, the Pallino who was my officer warring with the man who was my friend. “Right then,” he said at last. “Decades eight, nine, ten: hold the gate and be prepared to pull back if you’re overwhelmed! All the rest: with me!”
* * *
The base of the wall was not far: up the way the retreating soldiers had come and along a short path beneath the shuttered fronts of shops and eateries to where the banks of public lifts stood. We encountered no resistance as we hurried along. The bulk of the fighting was further north along the valley, near the center where the city was widest and the shadow of the largest bridge fell across the ravine.
The Irchtani screeched above us. As we rounded the corner, I beheld a great swath of the striated rock rising above the domes of the low, concrete buildings built along the lip of the terrace above us. The lift tubes—built into that mighty edifice—rose perhaps five hundred feet above our heads to the battlement-crowned heights of Deira’s inner wall. The flash of plasma cannons and the roar of the Javelins played from those battlements, and I saw Irchtani auxiliaries leaping from the merlons and wheeling in the air, shooting and sweeping the swirling nahute from the sky with their long cutlasses.
And I saw them, not darkly clad but armored as Iubalu had been in plate of shimmering white, their jointed limbs and spade-like hands sinking deep into the stone of the rock face and into mortar where masonry began. Kuhn had been right to name them giants, for even at a distance I knew them to be more than twice the height of a man—perhaps three times. Like were they in design to Iubalu, and yet unlike, for though their size was greater, they lacked the second set of arms and elongated, feline torso, having instead too-long legs bent backward like a goat’s.
I despaired, recalling how difficult the battle against Iubalu had been, for there were two—no, three—dozen of the hateful things climbing the terraces above. They did not move quickly, though they climbed faster than any man, horrid hands climbing hand-over-hand with the inexorable precision of clockwork, closing in on the missile batteries that lined the canyon’s lip between the city’s upper and lower quarters. The hand that had fashioned them I knew too well, having encountered their laboratory beneath the mountain fortress of Arae.
Here was the black product of an alliance between mankind and the Empire’s two greatest enemies. The once-human magi who called themselves MINOS had accepted the Faustian bargain Raine Smythe and I had refused on the Demiurge; they had sold themselves and their services to the Cielcin.
To Syriani Dorayaica.
And for what? For power? For knowledge—like Faust himself? Or out of simple resentment? Hatred of the Sollan Empire?
“Shoot them down!” I shouted.
The men about me aimed lances and plasma burners and fired.
The shots struck home, and the Cielcin demons kept climbing.
“Bastards are wearing shields,” Pallino said. “Hold your fire!”
“Up to the walls!” I said, and signaling the Irchtani kithuun, I added, “Barda, don’t let those things up there!”
With the funiculars and the freight lifts all disabled and the city power gone, access to the higher levels was possible only by a series of winding stairs that switched back and forth across the face of the mighty cliff. These were reserved for the poorest citizens of Deira in peacetime, those unwilling or unable to pay the single-kaspum lift toll, but that day—I thought—the stair would command a toll steeper still.
I was halfway to the base of the stair when I heard it again: that guttural, metallic roar, more like the noise of a jet engine than the scream of any throat and yet at once terribly animal in its wetness and evident malice.
For there was laughter in the sound.
Turning my head, I did not know what it was I’d expected to find, but nothing could have prepared me for the horror that was to come. Smoke filled the streets beside us, and the opening to the largest of these was framed by a round arch that supported a bank of apartments.
A hand appeared from the smoke. A white, six-fingered hand felt around and gripped the bottom of the arch. Then an arm emerged and a pointed elbow followed by the fingers of another hand that gripped the far corner of the apartment block. The world was momentarily silent, and I stood transfixed, stunned to realize that each hand was the size of fully grown man.
For a moment, I thought that the worst of my visions had come real, that here was one of the Watchers dragging itself from the Stygian black of dreams. The way it pulled its incredible bulk through the avenue put me in mind of some terrible infant clawing its way from the birth canal with taloned fingers, and the masonry crunched in its grasp. But this was not one of the nightmare things I had witnessed in my visions, but a terror of ceramic and steel.
A metal face appeared, and the terrible impression I had had of an infant only intensified, for it was bulbous and swollen, its huge machine eyes glowing like dying coals. It screamed again, jaws mighty enough to snap a man in two, and, with titanic effort, dragged its broad torso forward, shoulders scraping the sides of the avenue and cracking the archway.
And then it stood, and kept standing. Twenty feet tall it was, twenty-five. Thirty! A hulking monstrosity in black and white, clear cousin in design to the lesser giants that climbed the wall above, but greater than any I had seen. Greater than Iubalu, greater than the living failures I had encountered in the experiment tanks of Arae. Great almost as the smallest of our colossi.
I knew then with certainty that here was another of the Vayadan, the holy slaves that gathered round the person of the Prince of Princes, and facing it there in the square before the wall and the ascent, there was but one thing I could do.
“Run!” I pushed Renna past me, and four others after her, and turning spurred my men toward the stair.
Answering some command, perhaps, or heeding only the call to violence in its blood, one of the lesser demons on the wall above let go. It fell more than two hundred feet and struck the stones on all fours. The hindmost decade of our little force peeled off and spread out along the perimeter at the base of the stairs, for to keep tight formation against such a foe was to court death swift and hard.
Flagstones rose to meet me as I climbed, and my suit’s positive pressure helped to force hyper-oxygenated air into my lungs. Still, my breath came hard, and I spurred Valka on ahead of me, steadying her with a hand.
The beast below bellowed and swept its arms through the roof of the nearest building, dislodging the sniper that had nested there and sending the man’s mangled body careering over the heads of those fighting in the square below. Heedless of the men about it as a boy is to the insects beneath his feet, the demon advanced toward the wall, its shield and heavy armor drinking the fire forced upon it like sweet rain.
I climbed faster, hearing the metal crash behind. I knew the demon had killed our decade and was climbing the stair, limbs punching through men as it crawled after our heels.
Boom.
The hollow reverberation of a grenade blast sounded, and looking back I saw the metal monster reel and stagger back, momen
tarily disoriented, its armor cracked. Someone had tossed a mine at it, slow throw bypassing the shield as the device’s electromagnet clamped it to the ferrous endoskeleton beneath the white zircon of its armor.
But the steel limbs twitched, and though black ichor ran from the ruin of its jaw, it came, heedless to its own injuries as the undead SOMs that had served the Painted Man in the Arslan tea house. Smoking, staggering, the horrid creature stood.
The giant in the square bellowed again. A flaring flight of missiles flowered from its shoulder and studded the masonry about us, blowing stone pillars and fascia apart. A rain of splinters fell about us, rattling against my armor.
“We’re going to die here,” Pallino’s voice snarled in my ear. “There’s no way we’re making the top.”
“ ’Twas a mistake!” Valka put in, unhelpful.
Of the seventy that had left the safety of the tunnel mouth, perhaps forty remained.
“Climb!” I ordered them all. It was no mistake. The wall had to be defended. It was only that it might be impossible.
Unless . . .
“Barda!” I rasped, sheltering with Valka behind the pillar on the landing as the blast of another magnetic mine sounded behind us. “Barda, we’re pinned down on the stair!”
I did not hear the Irchtani kithuun’s reply, for the vayadan-general below chose that moment to scream again.
This time another scream answered it, free and high and wild on the winds, and for a moment—despite the horror and dire moment in which we all stood—I was a boy again, and running on the wall-walks of Devil’s Rest playing Simeon the Red.
Gray- and green-feathered shapes fell from the sky, pulling knots of nahute in their wake. Plasma fire peppered the stair behind us, and turning I beheld the spread of mighty wings and felt the wind buffet me.
There must have been three hundred of them.
How they had come so fast I could not say, but there they were, and a moment after clawed feet with talons long as daggers gripped my shoulders and my feet left the ground.
One of the Irchtani had me in its claws, and with each beat of its wings we rose higher, leaving that doomed stair and the Cielcin behind.
“You are heavy, Devil Man!” came the familiar voice, and I recognized Udax.
“That is twice now I owe you my life!” I said.
“Which puts you in my debt!” the centurion replied.
Despite the nahute and the enemy fire still thick around us, I laughed. “Just so!”
Another of the xenobites carried Valka ahead of me, and there were Pallino and Renna. Another explosion rocked the stairs behind, and I saw the ruined demon fall back at last in splinters. The magi of MINOS had done their work well, for the inhuman things were built to withstand far more than any man or Cielcin could bear.
One soldier leaped from the rail, and a diving Irchtani caught him by his ankle mere feet from the ground. Another stood on the precipice, hand outstretched. I thrust out my hand. “Take it!” I cried. “Jump, you fool!”
The man did not jump, for in that moment the ancient stair—which had stood since the founding of Deira when the settlers had carved their strange metropolis out of the Valles Merguli—cracked and broke as last. I can still imagine that I felt his hand brush mine as he fell, and cursed myself. My vision might have saved him, if I could have but reached it in the chaos.
I do not know his name, did not see his face in those last moments.
I had a lingering image of the crumbling stair as we flew up and away: the lower levels of masonry rotting with flame and rocked by weapons fire. One of the Irchtani above us was struck by a missile launched by the horrific titan below and fell with his human charge—but not Udax.
We flew.
CHAPTER 77
UPON THE RAMPARTS
UDAX DROPPED ME AMONG my men. Human hands seized me, but the closeness of them and the adrenaline still toxic in my blood drove me to panic, and I tore my mask from my face. Only with the helmet removed did I recognize the green star of medical technicians, and waved them back.
“I’m not hurt!” I said, then more forcibly, “I’m fine! Damn your eyes, get back!”
“What the hell was that?” Valka asked, still helmeted not far off.
Udax answered her. “It is coming.”
On my feet once more, I answered her. “That,” I rubbed my face with my hands, “that . . . was one of the chimeras MINOS built for Dorayaica.”
“But ’tis so much . . . so much bigger than the others.”
“One of a number,” I muttered, repeating the words Iubalu had said to me. “One of six.”
“What?”
“Are you all right, Had?” Pallino cut in, tilting his head behind his red-and-black chiliarch’s visor.
I pushed the medtechs away from me. “I’m fine, damn it! It’s their commander. Like the one we killed on that ship.” I gestured to Udax.
The Irchtani hopped from one foot to the other. “It is different,” he said. “We cannot kill it like the last.”
“Perhaps not,” I said.
The Irchtani had brought us to a command post atop the inner wall, and there we’d won a brief respite. The square-lined black mass of a Javelin missile battery hunched not far off, and the space about held armored crates of weapons and explosives. Hauptmann’s men—legionnaires and naval technicians alike—moved about with cold precision, doing all they could to manage the fight below and about them.
“Who has command here?” I asked, and struck by a notion, said, “Belay that! Aristedes!”
“Still here,” came the intus’s reply.
“Where are those lighters? We need air support. There’s a . . . thing in the square at the base of the wall. A giant Cielcin chimera, must be thirty feet high!”
Aristedes’s response was hesitant. “There are still men in the plaza.”
“Then get them out!” I ordered him, half-running to the parapet to look down. The behemoth was still there, watching from the arch while its lieutenants and their troopers battled our men on the plaza five hundred feet below.
“Target the hybrids!” I said to the gunnery officer at hand. “Now!”
Below, our men were breaking, running in accordance with Lorian’s orders, pulling back into the city, where at least they might thin out the herd of pursuing Cielcin even as the machines focused on the wall. I could not shake the feeling that the day had slipped from me. Cursing, I wheeled, and saw here and there hoplites with shoulder-mounted grenade launchers standing at the edge of the parapet, each steadied by one or two of his compatriots. They fired down on the enemy, but to no avail.
One of them leaped bodily onto the walls, one spade hand punching through the throat of a grenadier and hurling his body into the next man behind him. We could not fire the missiles at it, not at such close range, not with our men about.
The air roared with the noise of engines, and three Sparrowhawk lighters tore the sky above us, machine guns opening fire on the face of the wall beneath us, but even as they strafed the escarpment, three more of the metal monsters leaped onto the battlements. One of the javelin emplacements erupted in a nimbus of scarlet flame, and I was glad at least that with the stair destroyed the main body of the Cielcin host below would have to trek nearly a mile to reach the next one. But there were Cielcin in the upper district, and it was against them that most of Hauptmann’s ground troops were dedicated.
“We’re going to lose the city,” Valka said, speaking over our private channel through the bone conduction patch behind my ear.
Turning to look at her, I found her surprisingly far away. Without the helmet it was easy to forget the comms apparatus. I offered her a sad smile, and mouthed the words, “Not yet.”
She shook her head.
The Sparrowhawks screamed by again, and I drew back from the parapet and donned my helmet once more. The f
alse-color imagery cut the haze and smoke, and the suit’s recycled air, while stale and antiseptic, smelled less of blood and ash and burning bodies. The square below erupted in florets of red and white, and the air shook as I leaped down the short stair from the turret to the wall. Another of the chimeras had gained the battlements and stood with one clawed foot planted on the decorative merlon and the other clamped around the face of a newly dead soldier. Seeing it, I swore.
“Ti-saem gi!” I cried out, and kindled my sword. “Here! Here!”
The chimera turned its head. A blank arc of metal covered all its face but its jaws, just like Iubalu. But it was smaller than that other monstrosity, and had only the one sword in its grasp. Sighting me and guessing me for an officer by my strange costume and gleaming weapon, it crouched low and came forward, moving like some species of ape. The blade it held was longer than even the longest claymore made for human hands. Almost contemptuously, it swept the weapon through two men within reach. The ceramic blade notched their armor, but it was the force of the blow that carried them over the parapet and dropped them screaming five hundred feet to the burning plaza below.
“Lord Marlowe.” It was Aristedes. I did not answer him. “Their fleet is peeling off the attack in orbit, diverting to the ground. You have incoming.”
I ignored him. My mind crouched in that same place our ancestors so often found themselves when faced with the standing cobra. I knew full well how fast the creatures could move. For a moment—a brief moment—my vision flickered and I saw the parallel instances of my opponent and the battlement on which we stood, saw the subtle variations in movement and force. The different outcomes. Some piece of my focus had clicked into place, and I was clear as mountain water.
The xenobite struck . . .
. . . and fell in two pieces.
I had seen the angle of its attack and stepped inside it, aiming my sword along a hair-fine fault in the adamant plate and shearing the chimera in half with a rising cut. I was so stunned, my unnatural vision shattered as half the creature tumbled over the parapet.
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