Oh, they did a real piece of work on this place. Great swathes of the city were in ruins, some just deserts of rubble, other buildings standing without roofs, without their full complement of walls, eyesocket windows staring out over so much devastation.
Could have been Collegium, she reflected. Stick a lake on it, could be Solarno. Then she was shifting her Stormreader violently in the air because someone was shooting at her.
She was not supposed to have come here with Stenwold and Kymene. She wasn’t of Maker’s Own Company and, if she had given a curse about chains of command, she should have been winging her way towards Capitas even now. But she was firmly of the position that she did absolutely what she wanted, and telling her to do things that she didn’t want was a quick way to see the back of her, whether the orders came from a Sarnesh tactician with a nasty glint in his eye or from Stenwold Maker himself.
What she remembered most in all the war, though, was defending Collegium in the early days, when the Empire’s aerial strength had been so superior, and when she and her fellows had been using every ounce of skill and Collegiate ingenuity just to survive each day and night of the air raids.
So many of the men and women who had fought alongside her had been Mynans. They had traded in their ragbag assortment of machines for Stormreaders, and they had given the inexperienced locals their backbone, their fighting spirit. And they had died, her fellow pilots, her peers and her allies and her friends. So many of them had given their lives for Collegium, without hesitation.
And this was what they had dreamt of: the return to Myna. Some of those airmen and women were with her even now, coursing swiftly through the sky, throwing themselves against the Spearflights and the Farsphex of the enemy. Others were with them only as names and memories, but it was for them that Taki had come too.
She turned the Stormreader on one wingtip, neatly as ever her old Esca had handled, her rotaries severing the tail of a clumsy Spearflight and sending it spinning out of her course. There were mindlinked Imperial Farsphex pilots here, but they were still too few to prevent the airships coming in, with Taki and the Mynan pilots driving them away. The flower of the Imperial Air Corps had fallen over Collegium, and the replacement pilots and machines had been scattered across too many fronts.
She let her orthopter swing wide to see how the airships were getting on. One was coming down some way outside the walls, and she guessed that its envelope had been holed a few times and its crew had not wanted to risk a drop. Another was actually descending onto the wall itself, and she saw Imperial troops desperately flying and scrabbling to get up there and oppose the landing, like a siege from an upside-down world.
The Sea-kinden were in that vessel, she saw. There was no mistaking their colossal armoured forms leaping down onto the wall – warriors from a world where falling was seldom something to be feared. At least one misjudged and dropped from the walls like a rockslide, but the rest were already fighting, shrugging off snapbow bolts and stingshot and carving joyously through the Wasps. Rosander’s pale-plated form shone out at their head.
And we’re in. Taki slung her machine through a cloud of Light Airborne, rotaries blazing to scatter them, catching a brief, messy glimpse of one luckless man torn apart by the barrage.
The Imperial air counter-assault was getting more determined – she reckoned they’d put everything they had into the air by now, pulled back anything that might have otherwise been bedevilling the locals. The airships were coming under fierce assault, and one was listing badly as it tried to get to the ground, the cells within its canopy venting gas through holes large enough for Taki to see even at this distance. There had been a suggestion that they simply drop the relief force where the local uprising had made its stand, but it was plain that the Imperials were not going to let these lumbering dirigibles get that far.
Another airship had coasted over the wall and was descending onto the rubble with absurd care, even while the Farsphex strafed it, disgorging Mynan soldiers who were willing to jump the last few feet because they had been waiting for this moment for too long. Stenwold Maker would be down there, too, probably holding on to the rail and staring out at the battle to come. The Wasps would not be slow with their response.
‘Gannic!’ the Red Watch man was yelling. ‘Gannic! Where are you?’ Even though the halfbreed engineer was virtually in front of him. ‘Halfways bastard, what were you doing?’ The man’s face was purple with anger, eyes crammed full of suspicion.
‘Sleeping, sir. What’s happening?’
‘The Lowlanders have got here,’ snapped Red Watch. ‘We move now. I’ve got the garrison mobilized already, you sluggard. We’re taking our special cargo up to the enemy right now.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Red Watch was already storming off, leaving Gannic to stumble in his wake. ‘We’re moving in the artillery. We can sling this stuff up onto the top level, let it crack open and obliterate the whole pack of them. If the artillery doesn’t manage to get there, then you’ll take squads in, carry the stuff, plant it and set it to explode.’
And get out. You forgot to say, ‘Get out,’ Gannic thought, but did not say.
Red Watch seemed to have overheard even the thought, because he rounded furiously on the silent Gannic. ‘This mission is top priority, orders from the Empress herself,’ he snarled. ‘I didn’t want to have to rely on you. You’re not one of us.’ It was not clear whether he meant the Watch or the Wasp race as a whole, or some other more arcane qualification. ‘Understand, though: this must succeed. Nothing can go wrong. There can be no deviation. We are here to execute a city, in the Empress’s name. Do you understand?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Gannic got out.
‘And if that means you have to stand over these things with a hammer and hit them until they blow, you’ll do it.’
‘Sir, you can’t just . . . after Szar last time, there are failsafes. They have to be—’
‘Whatever they have to be, you do it. You make sure it’s done.’ Red Watch waved away the technical details, the hours of careful thought put in by Gannic’s fellow engineers.
Then Red Watch was off to intimidate some of the garrison officers. ‘Get moving! Get moving up the tiers. We need to stop the locals getting out. I want all of your snipers out on the streets. I want that relief force slowed down to a crawl. Get me your Sentinels and put them in the Lowlanders’ way. Anything to give us more time!’
‘Sir!’ Gannic got as close to tugging on the man’s sleeve as he dared.
‘What is it?’
‘Sir, you said up . . . you said the Mynans are . . . they’re on the top tier of the city.’
‘That’s where we’ve got them penned,’ Red Watch acknowledged.
Oh . . . ‘Sir, this gas is heavier than air. Once it’s done its work on the Mynans, it’ll . . . come back down, to us.’
‘It’s gas. Don’t be ridiculous,’ Red Watch pronounced firmly, and strode off.
Oh, no, no no, don’t say he knows that little about artifice. Gannic glanced around at the mustered force of the Myna garrison, marching to the orders of their Empress, and not one of them understanding what was about to happen. He felt like waving his hands in the air and shouting, You’re all going to die! You’re heading straight to your deaths!
And he would be the one who would kill them, along with all the Mynans, a city-full of Mynans crammed together in that part of the city they naively believed that they had won back. They had not been bombed, nor had the Airborne dropped in to break them up and scatter them, and they had not asked why. They did not know that the Empress had a purpose even for their defiance. A terrible, terrible purpose.
He could walk away, he realized. He felt the fulcrum moment of his life, the point when he could say ‘no’ – even just to himself – and walk away, and not be the man who murdered an entire city.
But the Red Watch man would hunt him down, or the Empress would send some other to do it, or the Rekef or . . . And Gannic was a creature of the Empire
. Where else could he go?
But as soon as the canisters are in the air, I’m running.
The air was still being contested, the Stormreaders tilting and stooping, outnumbered by the Imperial craft. The majority of the Wasp pilots were operating in old Spearflights, though – yesterday’s machines no match for today’s. Each time Stenwold looked up, there seemed to be fewer of them.
He had tasked the pilots with getting the word through to the Mynan enclave that help was coming, but there was no way of knowing if they had succeeded. The ground forces, their airships abandoned behind them, were just forcing their way onwards through the city, scouting ahead as best they could and trying not to stop for anything.
The Empire was plainly committed to foiling them in that last objective. Light Airborne had begun dropping on them soon after they started off, squads of Wasps finding rooftops or empty storeys to shoot from, fleeing when they were challenged, but always coming back for more.
The attackers’ response to this was simply not to let this tactic delay them at all, moving through the war-ravaged streets of Myna as swiftly as they could, so that by the time the Wasps had set up their ambush, their enemies were already passing on. If the Imperial troops had been a regular field army, then this would have become an exercise in accumulating casualties. The Mynan garrison was larger than most, but it lacked the same keen edge of battlefield veterans. The attackers’ speed and simple determination to press ahead caught the Wasp garrison off guard and out of position. The airborne squads were picked off in the air as they tried to get in place, or sometimes found that the fleetest of their enemies had already staked out their hiding places.
By this time, the pilots had reported seeing a large Imperial column heading towards the Mynan enclave, travelling with automotive-hauled siege engines. Nobody liked the sound of that.
‘Pick up the pace,’ came the order, directed at soldiers already making the best time they could, and then the first barricades were sighted – mounded banks of rubble hastily shovelled into place by the Wasps to keep the Mynan relief from crossing their own city.
Stenwold and Kymene had gone forwards to see what the Empire had achieved in the time they had grudgingly allowed it.
Not so much, was the opinion, but it was plain that the Empire had made a serious stand there. He saw the spears of heavy infantry, a handful of repeating ballistae and leadshotters.
‘Worth going round?’ he asked Kymene.
‘If it was, would they have devoted so much to this?’ A rhetorical question. ‘The street to their left, you see it? That curves back round behind them, though. Scouts say it’s all bombed to pieces – craters, rubble, hard going – but we’ll take it at a run, fast as we can. There’ll be snipers there, most likely, but let’s hope not many. Meanwhile . . .’
‘We’ll hold their attention,’ Stenwold confirmed. ‘You think Rosander’s up for it?’
This last was for Paladrya’s benefit, in her notional position as Sea-kinden liaison. In truth, Rosander was plainly like the sea itself, a force not to be commanded or channelled.
‘He’s not turned away from a fight yet,’ she confirmed. It was an unavoidable truth that the plight of Myna had not affected the Nauarch of the Thousand Spines, nor was he remotely interested in the political differences between the Empire and its enemies. He was concerned instead with stamping his mark on the land, in being the first and only man of his people to defeat the land-kinden at their own game. He was enjoying himself and, every time his hugely armoured Onychoi lumbered into battle, Stenwold was grateful once more that they were on his side. It could have been so different.
‘You stay back,’ he cautioned Paladrya.
‘And you? Will you stay back with me?’
He grimaced. ‘The Maker’s Own need me to direct them. They’ll be marching right there in Rosander’s wake, to hold whatever ground he takes.’ For the Onychoi simply did not understand about securing their conquests – they just went forwards – and if the Wasps flew back down behind them, they would never know.
‘Well, then I come with you,’ Paladrya told him.
‘You don’t even have armour—’
‘And you’ve been to such pains to tell me how these snapbows wouldn’t care if I did,’ she pointed out.
To Stenwold’s annoyance, Kymene smirked at that. ‘She has you there. And, besides, with the way they’re deploying their Airborne, being at the rear’s no guarantee of remaining safe.’
‘Well, then.’ Stenwold threw up his hands. ‘Let’s be at it. Stay safe, Kymene.’
‘Tell that to the Wasps.’ She was off then, shouting to her followers, the black and red armour of the Mynans feinting a rush towards the Imperial position – drawing their siege engines out of line – before flooding off to one side, keeping up the pace even when they hit the broken, bomb-scarred wasteland beyond.
‘Rosander, they’re all yours!’ Stenwold yelled. Then: ‘Maker’s Own! Form on me, maniples ready to advance!’
He saw several flights of Airborne lift up from beyond the barricade, obviously about to go after Kymene, but then the Sea-kinden were in motion, a great armoured wedge of them advancing like the tide towards the Imperial lines. The Airborne were abruptly in confusion – Stenwold had the sense of conflicting orders, a difference of opinion on where to commit their forces. If he had been in charge, then he would have sent the Airborne off anyway – only a fool let himself be flanked – but the onrush of Rosander’s warriors was a fearsome and alien sight. The Airborne scattered, swirled, and dropped back down at last. By then the artillery was loosing – a leadshotter smashing one Onychoi into bloody fragments, ballistae bolts bursting and flaring as they exploded, with mixed results. Stenwold saw at least one man get knocked flat by the impact, but simply lever himself up again, heavy mail crazed with lines but obviously holding together.
Then Stenwold’s feet took him forwards, snapbow in his hands and Paladrya at his back, and with the soldiers of the Maker’s Own on both sides. There was almost none left now of those who had earned their battle cry and motto by going with him to meet Tynan’s Second Army that first time. He bellowed it out anyway, ‘Through the Gate!’ and heard it taken up all along the line, a ferocious, bloodthirsty roar such as nobody had heard from the Beetle-kinden since their revolution.
The Onychoi charge did not slow. Some of them died – struck through the eyeslits or throats by snapbow bolts, their strong armour punched in by the fists of leadshotters or torn open by the explosive spears of ballistae – but their thunderous approach ignored it. Perhaps they were moving with such momentum that they could not have stopped if they had wanted to.
The Wasp infantry met them at the crest of the barricade, levering at them with spears, turning them back and prising them over, the shifting, sliding slope of loose stone denying them footing. The Onychoi fell back, scraping down on their backs, lurching sideways off balance. The Wasps were not even trying to pierce that indomitable mail, but only to keep them back, to buy time. The expressions on the defenders’ faces spoke eloquently that they understood they could not win, only lose over a longer period of time.
The Sea-kinden’s own bolts were tearing into the defenders, and Stenwold’s people were shooting now – picking them off because they had to hold the top of the barricade to keep the Onychoi at bay.
‘They’re fighting behind!’ Paladrya yelled in Stenwold’s ear, and he saw that it was true. The Airborne were shooting at a new enemy – Kymene had made the distance even faster than he had expected.
He saw the first flash of black and red as the Mynans surged into view, and then the defence of the barricade collapsed. The Airborne took to the skies, fleeing to some other bottleneck. The infantry tried to run, but by that time Kymene’s force was behind them, and the Mynans were not inclined to take prisoners or show mercy.
The Onychoi finally gained the top and went skidding and scrabbling down the far side, and Stenwold could only imagine what the Wasps could think in their
last moments, faced with these warriors from beyond any civilized nation they could imagine, strong and resilient beyond belief. He found himself rushing at their very heels, not a foe left there for him to fight, then he broke off to find Kymene again.
‘They’ll throw something else in our way,’ she told him, ‘but we have a clean run to their column, the scouts say. If we move fast, they won’t have the time to set another blockade like this one.’ Her troops were marching off, double time, already scanning the skies for the next band of Airborne.
‘Come on, Maker!’ Rosander’s voice boomed nearby. ‘What are you waiting for?’
‘Nothing. I’ve waited long enough for this.’ Stenwold saw Kymene’s odd look and knew that she would not understand. Yes, this was her city, but he had seen it fall twenty years before, and he had not been present the last time the Mynans had fought free of their conquerors. This time it would be real for him. This time he would personally see Myna free, and perhaps lay to rest those decades-old memories.
He was not young, and he had plenty of old injuries to drag him back, but somehow he kept up the pace, though Paladrya had to steady him whenever he lost his footing on the rubble. On all sides the broken facades of Myna gazed at him hollowly, spurring him on with their mute reminders. Occasionally the snapbow bolts sang out – he saw men and women go down and get dragged into cover by their comrades, but they fell singly, and the Wasps could not slow the rest enough. He had the sense of the Empire’s brutal hold on this city disintegrating.
At one point he found himself struggling over another barricade, his feet slipping on the broken pieces of Mynan homes, but it was built lower than the last and the Empire had not stayed to defend it. The liberators were driving the enemy ahead of them like leaves before a storm.
‘Maker!’ Kymene was shouting, and he looked up and saw movement ahead – not an organized force placed there to delay them, but the main Imperial column, a great mass of men and machines seen in slices between the half-fallen buildings. They were reforming, and he saw Airborne all over the sky searching for roosts from which to shoot, whilst others were milling in the streets. He saw the articulated bulk of a Sentinel clatter into view before it made a scraping turn to face the oncoming enemy.
Seal of the Worm Page 48