Chapter 42 #5
For a moment, he thinks they might make it – Shipwright crouched low, clinging on white-knuckled; Arissa as effortless as a show rider, spine scalloped against her horse’s back.
The front line of their troops approaches, peeling apart to draw them in.
Shields locking. The rough voices of the captains readying their crews.
From behind comes a shriek like an eagle.
Those blonde warriors surging forwards, arms lifting, and suddenly the sky is filled with bright, leaf-bladed spears.
There’s a tearing sound over his shoulder, and one strikes the ground to his left.
The next kisses the skin on his cheek with a spatter of blood.
He bites back a yell, calls to Shipwright. ‘Now!’
Somehow, she manages to kick the spinner into gear. Her right hand hanked mercilessly in the horse’s hair, her left shifting forefinger and thumb until the buzz of the brass singes his teeth.
Shroudweaver dips to the grass and gathers what power he can, all the little souls of worm and mouse and bug.
The earth blackens as his horse’s hooves churn it into ash.
The spears fall like percussion, like the beaks of birds.
The spinner hums, and he saws the reins, pulls his horse closer to Shipwright, to her buzzing hands.
For the briefest of seconds, he can feel all those tiny souls stringing his body like lamps on a wire. Then he reaches for the red thread, and pushes them into the spinner.
The machine screams like a wasp hive, and he feels the force of it expand outwards, like a blossoming flower. The horses stagger with the weight, and Shipwright curses, the palm of her hand blistering to raw strips.
‘Damn you!’
‘Sorry. Keep it going! Please.’
The next spear hits the spinner’s field dead on, ploughing a straight course to Shipwright’s skull. Before it gets there, it’s lifted, spun, shivered into shards of falling metal and wood, which fray into harmless splinters as the bubble created by the spinner soars to full effect.
Fascinating, if he wasn’t shitting himself.
The souls leave him. The spinner whines like a boiled cat.
It’s a few hundred yards to their own lines now. Then at his back, a tearing, percussive sound, as if the earth had suddenly learnt to flow like water.
A stark, tall woman sings at the edge of the Empire’s line, her voice layering, harmonising with itself, lifting the soil as her lungs rise.
Shroudweaver urges his horse faster.
A splintering behind them as one of the ruined cottages is caught, lifted, the stones tearing with furious noise, arcing down into the ranks of Hesper’s marines. Blood. Screams. Where the stones land their line folds inwards in a mess of yelling bodies.
They’re a breath away, two, when the rising earth clips the back hooves of Shipwright’s horse, lifting them both in a somersault over the lines. Arissa and Shroudweaver follow a second later.
He doesn’t have time to disentangle himself, so the only thing he can do is twist to put the horse’s body between him and the earth.
When he lands, he can hear the horse’s shins snap. He pulls himself free of the screaming animal as the shield from the spinner winks out; rolls to one side as spears land, one through the poor beast’s throat, the other just shy of his shoulder.
Staggers to his feet, breath ragged, soaked in hot blood.
Pulls Shipwright free. She’s somehow mostly unharmed, buried in a crater under the body of her horse, hollowed out by the dying implosion of the spinner. Her left hand is a blistered, bloody mess clutched in his own.
‘We’re going to talk about this, Shroudweaver.’
He grins despite himself, picks up a shield from a dying marine, still clawing futilely at the spear through her guts. His head swills with terror and elation.
From their left, Arissa reels to her feet, armour dented and helmet bloody over one brow, her sword coming clear of its scabbard.
She yells for the charge, and the rest is a blur.
Perhaps he remembers his legs lifting, pounding the torn earth.
Perhaps he remembers the shape of that stark, tall woman swaying as a crossbow bolt bows her ribs, her harsh harmonies falling silent, stilling the earth.
The ships’ crews diving through that winnowing rain of spears, into the rats’ warren of cottages and outbuildings. The skeleton of the Summer Town filling with steel.
The mercy of return fire as the ship’s ballistae began to find their mark, skittering off some of those tall shields, punching through others.
The slow advance of the dead, then faster as the Gem’s hands rose, stumbling and hurtling over the broken ground. The living soldiers hanging back, locking shields and lowering spears. Letting the dead do the work.
Faster still, some with feet torn and ragged, others only a little paler than the living, tucked inside neat boots that were once embroidered by lovers, punched by the skilled hands of craftsmen.
The marines aren’t fazed. Quick economical barks that would normally flit from mast to mast peel their charging groups into neat crescents.
The dead hit them in silence, met with roars and curses. The back of each crescent crumples and the sides sweep in, men and women armed with cruel cutlasses and the single-sided slip daggers so beloved of Hesper’s back alleys.
They’d planned for this, for fighting something that might not want to drop with any decency.
‘Go for the legs,’ Shroudweaver yells. A dreadlocked woman flashes him a wicked smile, ‘Whatever you want, Weaver.’
Blades fall, severing sinews, tendons, the backs of knees.
A few of the crews aren’t quite quick enough, and get caught by a clumsy blade or a hurled spear, but, somehow, it works. The marines peel back, scattering into the ruins. When the dead follow, garrottes swing out razor-sharp and heads tumble.
Shroudweaver watches it all with a faint vertigo. Pulled up out of his own body, it feels like. He’s never really been in a fight like this before.
A man windmills at him, arms flailing, teeth spread wide in a savage grin.
Instinctively, Shroudweaver pulls with the silver threads of his left hand, tugs him off-balance, and strikes with the red of the right, sending a clutch of little souls lancing into the side of the man’s face.
His jaw explodes in white fire and the body lurches sideways and away.
Shroudweaver steps forwards, ducking against a wall as a spear whirs past inches from his face, and reties frayed threads around his shaking hands.
The living soldiers of Thell are advancing in the wake of the dead. Shields locked, spears out.
The marines try to flank them but they’re outmatched. Rapidly, Hesper’s frontline is pushed back into the ruins of the outer city. Thrust against walls, speared against the stones.
The fighting is brief and brutal. A shield batters Shroudweaver, knocking him to the ground.
Glimpsing a raised spear, a helmet, he tries to roll before the shield explodes from the side, and a whirring, buzzing rain of punches drives his attacker to the ground.
Shipwright hauls him to his feet, ducks a thrust from a charging warrior, then recoils as Arissa’s sword rises from behind him, cutting into the man’s neck, briefly sticking on his spine.
She tugs it free, pushing the body off the sword with her boot. Looks at the pair of them.
‘This is bad. Where are they?’
Shroudweaver shrugs, heart racing. ‘I don’t even know who I’m looking for.’
They backpedal as a squad of marines roils past.
‘We don’t have the numbers for a drawn-out fight like this,’ Arissa yells, as they hurry up some broken stairs to crouch on a low roof.
Distantly, the Gem watches the struggle. Shroudweaver can feel its gaze from here, like a sore under the skin.
Shipwright steadies his shaking shoulders. ‘We’re not done yet, not by a long shot.’
She calls down to the marines below. ‘Hellfire, like we practiced.’
Within the press, a few men peel off, digging into satchels to produce clay jars stuffed with the powder for which Hesper is so rightly feared. Ship weapons originally, a gunners’ mix that would burn sails, and people, in a pinch.
Thell’s shield-bearers advance, implacable. Hesper had tried to plan for this too.
Slings arced up, burly tattooed arms sending the hellfires spiralling over and down towards the centre of the shield-walls.
Shipwright watches them like a hawk, eyes narrow and steady. Not enough in these to break a formation, usually, not enough fire in whatever stones they’d ground down. Not without a little push.
As the pots hit raised shields, bodies, the ground, they splinter. Shipwright opens her spinners at the sound of the first crack, lifting and firing each little grain of dust with energy beyond anything it should ever see.
The shields of Thell light up with scorching flame. It clings to iron, to bone, to hair and lips, and sears until there’s nothing left. A head ignites like a flare.
The formation reels, crumples, and the marines surge forwards.
Shipwright falls to her knees, and vomits. Her nose filled with the stink of burnt meat. On the ground below, half-charred voices call out in liquid, looping misery.
Western wars are not the same.
Hesper advances. The captains and marines finish off the injured with merciless efficiency.
The Gem’s head tilts, and Shroudweaver feels its gaze on them, before its horse turns and files back into the city. The remainder of its army pulls back with it. The stragglers are unceremoniously cut apart. Hesper pulls no punches once her blood is up.
Shroudweaver watches axes fall to sunder limbs. He feels faintly sick, but professionally, relieved. They’ve paid attention to his advice.
Arissa vaults to the ground and takes a fresh horse. Her hair’s wild and mussed, cheeks flushed, her eyes electric. ‘We need to take the gates.’
‘It could be a trap,’ Shroudweaver replies.
She checks a clasp. ‘Of course it is. I have confidence that you and Shipwright can carry us through any surprises.’
Shroudweaver sighs. ‘Lead on, I suppose.’