The snapbowmen that were
Drephos’s new experiment made their ragged ranks, but he drove them forwards,
forwards until they had passed the fleeing host of the first engagement, until
Totho, running with them, could see the dark line of the Sarnesh advance, the
great wall of shields.
One of them loosed,
perhaps just a fumble of the trigger, and abruptly they were all shooting,
together and individually, and Drephos was shouting at them. The master
artificer had his breastplate on over his robes, but he still looked nothing
like a soldier or an imperial officer. He cursed the soldiers with utter fury,
though, threatening them with impalement on the crossed spears unless they
reloaded and stood ready.
When he turned back to
Totho, though, he was calm personified. ‘Well out of effective range here,’ he
said, ‘but did you see?’
‘See, Master?’
‘Our bolts reached the
Ant lines,’ Drephos confirmed, and he was smiling as though he had just been
given a present. ‘Within range, from here. The Sarnesh even stopped for them.
Your remarkable invention, Totho!’
Abruptly he was all
business again, looking around at his soldiers. ‘On my order, I want a ten-yard
jump forwards to put us properly in range. Ready yourselves!’ His eyes
narrowed. ‘Now!’
Totho had to run, to
catch up with the line again, but Drephos flew. He flew badly, very awkwardly,
like a wounded man, but he put himself through it nonetheless to stay alongside
his secret weapon.
Totho
’s secret weapon. By the
time they arrived, the Wasps were just about in order, forming their two lines,
one kneeling and one standing. It was a familiar formation that crossbow units
all over the Lowlands used.
‘Stand ready!’ Drephos
called. He had officers for this task, of course, but they stood there dumb
whilst he made his own voice hoarse. He was quivering with excitement, uneven
features stretched in a mad grin. ‘Charge your bows!’
In ragged unison the
Wasp snapbowmen cranked back, pressurizing the air in the weapons’ batteries.
Totho could see in his head just how they worked, the designs he had made when
he was still an apprentice at Collegium.
‘The rest is trimming,’
Drephos had explained to him, after the first test. ‘Your battery is the
revolution! We could put a firepowder primer there instead of your device, and
use the long tooled barrel, but firepowder is clumsy. The discharge rocks the
weapon, and so you have no accuracy at any range, and it’s dangerous and
expensive to boot. Your discharge of air barely makes the weapon shudder as it
vents, and it is both safe and free. A revolution, Totho! War marches on
another step!’
There was something
obscene about Drephos’s expression now. The excitement that shook the man was
almost sexual.
‘Loose!’ he yelled.
The leading edge of the
Ant advance simply disintegrated, men and women collapsing backwards with
nothing but surprise and pain. There were round holes punched in shields, split
rings in chainmail, and soldiers all the way along the line were abruptly dead
without warning, even as the snap-snap-snap of the bows sounded all around
Totho.
In a split second, the
Ant tacticians must have made their decision, for the Ant lines were abruptly
charging forwards with all speed despite the distance, going from a steady plod
to an outright run without warning and without confusion. They outstripped
their Mantis allies for a moment, and they avoided their own fallen without
fail, not even slowing. For any other army, moving in full armour over such a distance,
it would have been madness, but they were the strongest soldiers in the world,
wearing mail for years until it became a second skin. It could be done, and
they did it.
On the flanks the
Mantids decided they were not to be outdone, and soon made up the distance,
dashing along in their light armour, their leather and their scale, rending the
air with their war-cries over the utter silence of the Ants.
They had taken the new
weapons as crossbows, imagining the Wasps desperately reloading, winding them
back, while seeing the approaching Ants closer and closer. One more round of
bolts at close range and then the charging Sarnesh would break them.
The next salvo of
snapbow bolts ripped through them, catching men in the second, the third and
fourth ranks. Sarnesh soldiers at a full run were brought to an instant halt as
their fellows ran into them, too close in their tight formations to stop or
turn. On the flanks there were Mantis soldiers spinning and falling, jerked
suddenly back by the power of the bolts. The Ant advance stumbled, faltered,
and then surged on into the next lash of the snapbows.
Totho’s stomach lurched,
and he felt his hands clenching uselessly. He wanted, he wanted so very badly,
to look away, but he fixed his eyes upon what was unfolding throughout the
Sarnesh lines.
I have a responsibility to my victims.
‘The tests already told
us, of course,’ Drephos breathed, even as his soldiers reloaded. ‘
This
is the true experiment, though. All those Ants in
their metal armour, and when our bolts strike metal, they flatten or even bend,
and yet they
still keep going
. They spin, even. A
man without armour might have it lance straight through him and leave no more
than a hole, if it missed his bones, but any armoured man whose armour fails is
a dead man there and then.’
Totho stared. He felt
nothing except cold, as if someone had stabbed him somewhere vital, and he was
simply waiting to die. He felt nothing, and he realized that meant not even
guilt or remorse.
At the Great College
they had told him that he would never amount to anything.
‘Loose!’ the master
artificer called once again.
At close range, the twin
ranks of the snapbowmen stopped the advance in its tracks. So many men and
women fell in that one instant that those behind were caught, trapped now with
a tangle of dead comrades before them who a moment ago had all been living and
breathing, had been kindred minds within theirs.
‘Down bows and back!’
Drephos told his protégés. ‘General Malkan’s move, I think.’
‘Why stop now?’ Totho
asked hopelessly.
Drephos smiled at him.
‘Ammunition, Totho. Have you any idea how many bolts we’ve loosed in the last
few seconds? Let Malkan spend his men instead, since they are more easily
replaced.’
Already the Wasp
soldiers of Malkan’s army were rushing past on either side of the firing line,
both on the ground and in the air, descending on the battered Ant-kinden with
sword and sting.
Before setting out,
General Malkan had left Drephos two thousand soldiers in Helleron, but in the
end the foundries, though working day and night, had produced only twelve
hundred snapbows, and so Drephos had done the best he could with what he had.
Back among the surgeons,
Che was tying another bandage when the invisible wave of news washed over them.
In an instant all the Ants were up, and beginning to move the wounded onto the
transport automotives. They worked as carefully as they could, but there was an
edge of haste to them that she had never seen in Ants before.
‘What is it?’ she asked
them. ‘What’s happening?’ but they had no answers, just grimly took up each
wounded soldier who still had a chance of survival and stretchered him or her
away.
Sperra took her
telescope back from Che and leapt into the air, putting it to her eye and
holding place with her wings.
‘They’re retreating!’
she called, her voice shaken. ‘The Sarnesh are falling back!’
‘What?’ Che asked. It
made no sense. They had been advancing steadily. ‘What’s going on? Tell us,
Sperra.’ Beside her, Achaeos patiently strung his bow.
‘The men at the front
are standing their ground, but the Wasps are all over them, and the rest are .
. . they’re running. They’re actually
running
.
They’re keeping their shields over their heads, but they’re coming back fast.’
All the remaining
automotives were pulling up, and there were men throwing open the doors of the
train. Che stared at it all in disbelief. ‘This can’t be happening!’
‘The Mantis-kinden on
the right edge are still fighting,’ Sperra was saying, her voice sounding less
and less steady. ‘They’re fighting like madmen, I’ve never seen the like, never
– but they’re all fighting alone. They’re killing them, killing the Wasps, but
there are so many coming at them now – they’re falling! All of them, they’re
falling!’
‘What about the left
flank?’ Achaeos called up to her.
‘They’ve drawn back with
the Ants. The Sarnesh who stayed to hold the line, they . . . they’re being
overrun! What can they do? They can’t get all the way back here before the
Wasps catch them!’
The last Ant adjutant
assigned to the Mantis left-side company saluted Scelae. He was shaking
slightly, but nothing else in pose or voice told anything more of the horror
that was in his mind.
‘They suggest you pull
back,’ he told her. ‘Two companies are going to stand here and hold them off,
to allow our people to reach the automotives and the rail line.’
‘Will that be enough?’
Scelae asked.
‘They say it will have
to be. We must fall back towards the city.’
Scelae cast around. She
had lost no more than a quarter of her force because, spread out as they had
been, the new Wasp weapon had whipped mostly into empty air around them. ‘You!’
she called, pointing to one of her Moth-kinden, a girl and one of their
youngest. Scelae had no time to assess her fitness for the task, time only to
give the order.
‘Get on to that moving
rail-machine,’ she said. ‘Then fly on to Dorax when it stops. Fly, and keep
flying until you’re there. They must know of this. Go now.’
With a look that was
close to tears, the Moth darted off.
‘I need help,’ Scelae
said to the other Moths, a mere dozen gathered close to her. ‘I need what help
you can give me. I know I cannot command it, but you see what must be done
here.’
‘We see what a Mantis
must do here,’ said their eldest, an old man of more than sixty years. ‘We
shall give you what we can.’
‘What can we do?’ one of
the others demanded. ‘The sun is out! What can we achieve, in broad daylight?’
‘You forget yourself,’
said the eldest. ‘Magic is fear, uncertainty, doubt. Where better to find these
things than on a battlefield? Now join with me.’
Scelae turned from them,
trusting them to do what they could. To the expectant Ant adjutant she said,
‘When your companies make their stand we shall stand with them. Tell your
masters that.’
‘That is
now
,’ the Ant said, and indeed the Wasps were approaching,
on the ground and in the air, a wave of the Wasp soldiers who so recently had
been fleeing, but were now howling for revenge.
The nearest Ant
companies had formed a long shieldwall two men deep, with crossbows levelled at
the rear. The soldiers braced for the impact of the Wasps, knowing that in
their sacrifice, their inevitable deaths, they would buy their kin time to run
for home.
When that was all they
had to give, they gave it gladly.
‘Ready!’ Scelae called.
Already there were Wasp airborne streaking overhead, diving on the running
troops, their stings crackling, or racing onwards towards the auto-motives.
She had lived a long
enough life, she decided. Spying for the Arcanum in Sarn, she had not thought
to be given this honour at last: to die as a Mantis ought.
‘Hunt out your deaths!’
she cried out to her warriors, and they raised their weapons and rushed
forwards.
‘I cannot see—’ Sperra
gasped. ‘No! I see some soldiers staying behind to hold them back. The Mantis .
. . The Mantis-kinden are fighting on the left. They have charged the Wasps—’
She choked on the words for it had been like watching sand disappear before a
wave. They were in there, though, spinning and slashing, inside the Wasp
formation, cutting and killing, and dying. ‘They are holding them!’ she cried
out. ‘I think . . . I think some of the Wasps are fighting with each other!
They are falling on each other, butchering each other in mid-air.’
The first of the running
soldiers were past them now, heading for the train. The wounded were still only
half loaded on board.
‘I think—’ Sperra
continued, telescope still to her eye, and just then the first of the Wasp
airborne struck her, sending her tumbling from the sky. He had been lunging
blade-first, but in his haste only his shoulder had struck; he swung round for
another pass and an arrow sprouted beneath his armpit, and he spiralled away
with a yell.
Achaeos nocked another
to his bow. The Ants doubled their pace with the wounded soldiers, knowing that
some would die from the exertion, but more would if they did not.
‘Ach!’ Sperra was now
holding her ribs, cursing but desperately trying to find her telescope. Che
lifted her bodily onto the nearest automotive, despite her protests.
‘Go!’ the Beetle told
her, and then the machine
was
moving, grinding off,
as soldiers flooded along beside it, filling the train neatly from the front
carriages back, orderly even in defeat.
Achaeos loosed his
second arrow, and then a brief moment of desolation and despair swept over him.
Out on the field, the madly fighting ball of Wasps had swept over the little
group of Moth-kinden, silencing what magic they had raised against the minds of
their enemies.
He put a third arrow to
the string and drew it back, but the fire of a sting-blast washed past him,
struck him to the ground. He heard Che scream but it was distant, very distant,
because his pain was so large and so immediate.
It hurt so much more
when they lifted him bodily onto the automotive’s flatbed amongst the wounded
he himself had been tending. ‘Che!’ he cried out, and he had a vague glimpse of
her face even as the vehicle began to move, but his out-thrust arm was
clutching at nothing. He was leaving her behind. The train was moving now as
well, and there was only one automotive left, and it seemed full to him. ‘Che!’
he yelled again, through the searing pain. She was shouting something back at
him, but he could not hear it.