‘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
curtain 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.