Several hundred yards to starboard, the
Blackthorne
and the
Frostfire
rolled in the gentle swell, low and quick in their new guns and colors. Pendred closed his eyes and saw the Fleet of a thousand years ago in similar battle dress.
The voice. A creaking of chains, sirens, and venting steam. The
Frostfire
was the first to move, and then the
Blackthorne
; the
Havengore
fell in behind the two frigates. Black smoke from poorly refined fuel oil poured from their funnels as they ran the canal to the Kingsgate at fifteen knots.
Their wakes washed against the grounded ships on the mudflats. Six hundred hulks of once grand ships watched the passing Fleet in a silence worthy of the dead's eternal dignity.
The channel was quickly cleared and as it opened into the Kingsgate the
Frostfire
quickened the pace to twenty knots.
The quays and streets of Duncarin were deserted; the Dresau Islands' army had departed a month before to join its allies in the west and north. Only a very few people, pathetically confused, stood at the waterfront to bid the Fleet goodbye.
Pendred and his fellow sailors sadly regarded the empty town, now populated only by ghosts and soulless outcasts; it was an infinitely depressing sight. How could it help being otherwise when Duncarin was the corpse of the Islands, and the Islands were the last corpse of the First World to finally lie down and die?
Pendred was shaken from his gray thoughts as the aged cruiser heeled over to starboard. A fresh wind holding the summer scents from Kyandra hit his face.
They cleared the Kingsgate, and although the wakes of only three ships instead of thousands beat against the breakwater, it was undeniably the Fleet that was setting out, again, for the Tyne delta.
The
Havengore
surged ahead into the light chop as the frigates assumed positions to port and starboard. The old silken cruising flags were broken out to trail a hundred feet behind the ship's masts. The dolphin and sea bird crests of the old naval families flew over the eastern Sea for the first time in a millennium.
Pendred could still hear the dart singing its malignant song over Guthrun and knew that, indeed, a final Apocalypse was at hand. He felt the fine old steel around him and the steady pulsing of the turbines.
This
was the ship, the only kind that a man should sail upon.
Garrik, mountain lord of Enom, selected a golden lance and automatic pistol from his armorer's hands and called upon his gods to ride with him and his men.
Martin Varnon, citizen of Svald, shouldered his crossbow and set fire to the Empire outpost; he moved off to rejoin his company, already making light contact with the main body of the retreating Empire Army.
Gunnar Egginhard had left his home on Guthrun fifteen years ago to journey across the southern wastes and to await this day.
In his youth he had been one of the better engineers in the Dresau Navy, with a post on the
Havengore
virtually assured him. Then he had heard of Radlov's plans and ideas about the Grayfields; he had thus come to the vast system of interlocking runways and ancient aircraft.
The Grayfields—which some tribes worshiped as the sleeping ground of angels that were waiting for the trumpet call of Judgment to rise and lay waste to the World. Far above Egginhard the voice of the Ship surpassed the power of any Heavenly assemblage.
Around him stood the ruined buildings, pitted runways, and dust heaps of once great planes. In front of him, though, was the concentrated labor of fifty years: twenty flyable planes with more or less trained crews. To his eye, they made up a picture more graceful and mighty than he had ever dreamed of on Guthrun. Legends from the First World, they were, even more than were the three ships of the Fleet.
Their sides had been pierced for cannon and machine gun, their bays filled with powder and Greek fire. He walked to his flagship and ran his hand along her cool, sleek sides, admired the sweep of her wings and the implied power of her engines. The
Victory,
even if she were as graceful as the stories said, was still a bloated parody of the Grayfields' craft; they were clean and came from the hands of men, and so they sailed under the hands of men. The
Victory
was a being unto herself, mysterious and more than a little corrupted in her heritage.
The man was clad in the glistening white of the People of the Ship. His hair was of a yellow color rarely seen around Gateway in those days. An effort had been made to absorb the Techno class completely into the People, but the man, as his father before him, had clung to his aristocratic past, loving the Ship and the promise of Home in a way that few of the People could understand. But Coral had apparently understood it, for the great man had watched over him and his father, and had singled them out for special attention. Coral never offered any explanation to the man for his concern.
He stood there, along the trailing edge of the starboard wing, five hundred feet above the surface of the Yards. Below him, thin trails of white interspersed with black or brown ran loosely from Gateway to the Ship. A hundred thousand persons lived under his eyes, waiting to be anesthetized and stacked like cordwood in the honeycomb passenger compartments that filled the Ship. Seven feet by three feet by three feet and they said that millions were going to be jammed into the hull and wings, and no one could say exactly how many—the whole World, perhaps.
Kiril had lived longer than anything mortal had a right to, and every day of his life he prayed for death. He had been born a man but the wars, the bombs, the poisons, radiations, heat, and the wizards of Salasar had turned him into a dark, semi-living shape which spent its time in shadow, fearing the sun as normal men fear the night.
A great many years ago, Kiril had come upon the tomb of a king, older even than the First World, and upon the mountain that had been raised over it. Ten years traveling due north from Enom had brought him to this cold refuge. Long ago Kiril had eaten the king's mummy and had wrapped his golden coffin around him for warmth. Now he lay calmly, immovable in the granite sarcophagus, his body overflowing its confines.
He silently twirled the little metal prayer wheel that he had made before his hands had changed. In between the prayers for death, Kiril thought and perceived and saw that the World into which he had been born was afire.
He saw a curving arm of territory, an Empire that rivaled even Salasar, running from the Sea into the very heart of the World. He saw a ring of modern armaments emplaced, some in the most curious ways, within this arm, guarding its core.
At the eastern end was a great mass of men, some in white and others in all the colors of kings. The white crown was contracting behind the gun wall and literally running to the west and then south to the Tyne Delta.
For a million turns of his prayer wheel, Kiril watched the World tremble and shake as it had in days past when Salasar was being defeated. He saw the Grayfields come alive again, hearing the lonely thunder of its few machines; and he saw the memory of the seven thousand ships of the Dresau Fleet being borne by three small black craft, hurrying to battle.
For a moment Kiril reveled in it. He thought that, indeed, a new day was at hand; then he stopped and saw that it was only the night, made brighter by the hideous burnings of war.
He cried to himself in the king's tomb; he had guessed that even after it had ended, he and his prayer wheel and the grave would remain.
A messenger had brought Egginhard word that the East had passed easily through Coral's gun ring; the Empire was in fast retreat and not even the men from the Armories stopped to man the great weapons. The campaign had dissolved into a foot race, Empire forces halting and fighting only when the East had completely encircled them.
As the two armies traveled west, the pace quickened; now there were only the empty badlands that separated them from the low mountains around the Yards.
By now, if all had gone well, the East should be atop those mountains, waiting for the two Fleets to arrive. An aide ran breathlessly up to Egginhard, holding a black-wrapped baton. Egginhard took the stick and threw it at the sun, laughing. "Now, mate, now!"
He ran quickly for the flagship, hoping that he would remember how to fly the thing; after all, he had only been aloft once before.
He scrambled up the ladder and eased into the commander's chair. Along the sand colored vastness of the Grayfields, the tiny figures of men were seen running through the wreckage and ruin. Three hundred men boarded the twenty airplanes.
Someone atop the flagship launched an orange flare and then jumped inside.
Slowly and with infinite dignity, the eight-and sixengined giants rolled across the runways. Screaming and raging like hurricanes, the air Fleet rose one by one and flew westward.
The few nomads who lived in those regions and who had refused the Ship and the Fleets looked to the skies; many committed suicide. A mere thousand feet from the ground, the airplanes swept toward the Tyne delta in a huge, flattened V.
Egginhard felt no qualms about the certainty of his never returning alive; such things no longer mattered much. He laid his gloved hands on the controls, letting the vibrations soak through his body. He was the master of it all; under his hand did this mightiest of all the East's devices wheel and turn. He was riding a fire and he would ride to his death against the evil of the West. He thought a bomb might be continuously going off inside of him, filling him with energy and inflexible purpose.
Pendred swung his glasses to starboard at the call of the lookout. Mountains were just visible to the west and several isolated peaks to the east; he focused more finely and saw a thin spike of metal rising, dagger-like, between the eastern mountains.
The Fleet increased speed to twenty-five knots and then to thirty. Signalmen stood by the battleflags.
Garrik and his fellow mountain lords stood upon the highest ridge above the Yards, marveling at what they saw there. Gateway seethed with scurrying maggot creatures all running for the
Victory.
He turned in his saddle to hear a strange roaring. There before him, twenty small dots quickly grew into a battle line of shining airships. They climbed the mountains and passed overhead; Garrik felt the hard warmth of their engines beat against his armor.
More thunder, from the Sea this time. Three black ships cushioned on catafalques of white foam. The sun glittered off the ships as yellow flashes spurted from their foredecks.
Garrik glanced quickly up and down the ridge.
Kiril, thousands of miles away, shuddered at the battle cries and screams as he saw the three waves descend upon the Yards.
Garrik's men poured out of the mountains like a spring flood, the colors of their shields and armor cutting into the oppressive drabness of Gateway. Already one of the aircraft had lost control and plowed into the city, sending up enormous columns of smoke.
The mounted knights and light infantry cut smoothly through the city; but the Empire Army had set up its perimeter around the Ship and there, in its shadow, the two armies fully joined. The World erupted beneath them.
Five miles at sea now, the Fleet sheered off to the port and loosed its first full broadsides; seven tons of explosives fell on the
Victory
's hull.
Egginhard led twelve of his machines on a run along the Empire side of the line; Greek fire flowed from their rounded bellies and set a mile of men on fire.
Few could see the Fortress when it awoke, for the
Victory
blocked the view from the east. All could hear it and feel the ground shake violently under their feet. Egginhard climbed above the Ship and saw a brilliant blue fire stirring in the Fortress's hollow center, rising and streaming upward and to the west. It sounded like an impossible, deep siren roar. Where the bolts were landing in the west, there were flashes visible even against the sun.
Egginhard brought the flagship about for another run, the acrid stench of cordite and black powder filling the cockpit. Then a hand roughly grabbed the plane and shook it. Shocked, the copilot looked around and then pointed upstream.
Gun Hill had joined the battle. Egginhard could see the guns, bigger than any four of his proud airships. First one and then the other fired a second round; the muzzle blast flattened the grass for miles around and battered his craft again like a toy.
The motor howl of the Fortress blended in the general bedlam of the battle around the Ship; the majestic rumblings of the Fleet, less than two miles offshore, became cricket chirpings compared to the two weapons on Gun Hill.
Down in the Yards, Garrik drew near to the milling line, skewering an Empire officer on his blade. He drew his pistol and although it killed efficiently enough, it was not violent enough for the mountain lord: its flash was lost in the swirl of steel and its noise was dead an inch from the muzzle. He dismounted and drew an ancient broadsword. Swinging the blade over his head, he waded deeper into the tangled mass of struggling bodies.
Seeing Garrik, his knights rushed to him with mace, sword, and morning star in their armored hands. All around the group, the white masses were turned to red and literally pounded into the concrete of the Yards. Insanely, Garrik started singing; his men joined as a drum regiment from Svald came up behind to beat its murderous war tunes. The old words came steel-edged from Garrik's mouth as he worked deeper and deeper into the Empire line. He felt more powerful than the huge shape that loomed above him, more powerful than anything that had ever lived on Earth. Sparks shot from his sword as it sank into cheap Empire helms and into the softer bone below. The fire from the airships licked close. The glittering swords and polished maces illuminated the scene with a magician's light. The rail-tracks on which the Yard's cranes traveled became big gutters, carrying the blood and shattered limbs down to the reddening Sea.