Like a grizzled yak he shambled into the chartroom. I knew who he was: Eflan’s campfire stories had been full of this man; the ageing “Ferikh,” Regiment Commander, of the fortress battalions, and High Commander before Plamen, who spent his days shuttered up in a dilapidated house, waiting for war. Although his big back was bent and he walked with a cane, his shoulders were broad as lintels, chest wide as a cauldron, and he loomed over the caliphs and officers who made way. A cap of green-rusted bronze covered one eye – nailed to the socket’s bone – and it had stained all that side of his face a murky colour. The cane met the edge of Plamen’s chart-table with a thud. Solid iron. As I stood on the other side with my papers, I was glad of the barrier. ‘Ferikh Quade,’ Rusper greeted. The old Ferikh’s lip was twisted in a scowl that looked fixed. A blue eye pinned Rusper’s goggled face but I could only meet its gaze a second. Was there anger there, distrust?
‘Viceroy Caliph Rusper Symphin,’ he rumbled as if coals moved in his belly. He asked about the condition of the High Commander. It seemed that Ferikh Quade had no quarrel with Rusper’s appointment in Plamen’s stead and wasn’t angry. It was just the thought of what might happen if he were that made my legs tremble. Quade took his place.
The grey-walled chartroom was large but not large enough today. Already this morning there’d been too many greetings, names and titles. Five caliphs were here – of the six – missing, as usual, Bardon of Methar. I’d never seen him and wondered now when he would come. Under martial law, they were all duty-bound to serve in defence of throne and desert. The Methan Regiment, whose Eighth Battalion Mounted Scimitars I’d travelled with, would mobilise with all the rest. But here, for now, the Methan Ferikh – Iskandar – spoke for Caliph Bardon.
I was exhausted; it was hard to keep focus. All through last night I’d worked with Rusper down in his new headquarters on fifth, to produce my series of maps; matching my visions of the Builders’ Roads with the geography of the northern desert.
He was fascinated by how symmetrically the network linked those sites around Antissa. It still amazed me just as much that, from the fortress the Roads branched out to other points of surface access: Shen Drumbar, Calvallagh, the Spectres and those ruins. Beneath at least one of those points delved a deep much like our own, making me wish I’d used the time better at Radhi. If I’d plunged the Sight under the harbour itself, instead of searching down the cliffs, would I have found another entrance to the Roads below that seabed?
When I’d put the thought to Rusper, he’d gone silent for a while. Then pointed out two more suspects. ‘If there are deep systems or entrances at these sites,’ he’d said, tracing a path across my drawings with his Guild-Ring finger, ‘then see the figure that emerges . . . ?’
Oh I saw it right enough; the ghostly lines of promise flickering in my head for a while now. If the sites were all connected, with Antissa at their core, then what we were looking at was an almost perfect, seven-pointed shape. A shape that turned Rusper’s deception of the Sanhedrin and First Circle into only half the lie we’d thought.
The points he’d traced: Chidh Uribb in Methar and Chidh Eshipas in Laudassa.
The Rath could be there after all.
Nevertheless, that shape stayed locked inside our minds, not penned on paper. The maps – my maps – we now presented to the caliphs, ferikhs and marszals contained only what was known for certain. And what they needed to know.
Whatever they’d agreed, Viceroy and Flag-Senera, it stayed a secret from me too. I knew it had something to do with Venara, Plamen’s sister. I also knew that Amyra, through her Iron Shield physicians, had ensured the Satrap’s sleep with drugs. Would the madman sleep throughout this war? Either way, preparations were begun. In full view.
And gathered speed. The Martial District woke and stretched its muscles to the rhythms of hammers smiting steel, flying crossbow volleys, quick-marching drills and screaming horses. The city crowds grew thinner too as, of course, it wasn’t only soldiers called back to martial service, but engineers of the guilds. On a constant feed of ropes and chains, the bulky Elmine oak components of war machines were raised up through the rubble-shaft, from fourth level. Limbs and frames, iron-plated, girdled round with rings of bronze, black from their months in hibernation; they were transported to the only quarter where there was space enough for them – the Southeast District’s lower quarter where the buildings lay in ruins – there to be sorted, treated, bolstered and assembled once again. These machines were indispensable to Rusper’s campaign strategy, and now I yearned to be a part of the Royal Guild workforce that built those mighty engines—the ones I’d seen crossing the borderlands a year, two years, ago.
But my own work was back on fourth where they’d come from. In my time away from the city, those half-formed pockets of granite had become the Royal Munitions. Here, Gudgeon headed the growing armaments operation, where a team of the Guild’s finest artisans and metalsmiths worked to produce more fusils, jezail cannons and frames. I was nowhere near qualified to help them; instead my duties were among the engineers of the chrozite foundry and adjoining smelters, manufacturing ammunition and stockpiling firepower. Squad by squad, the field-engineers who would be drafted for martial service – “jhendra” was the word – were issued fusils, schot and chrozite, then sent for training in the Martial District. What with the Hub ready to cave at any moment, the digging level wasn’t safe for practice-fire.
On the third day of preparations, Rusper inspected the engines; I shirked my work to go with him. Most of their number were still in skeleton phase, but I could tell which were the Trebs, and which the Pulls, Mules and Springers. These last were smaller engines, some ready. Antissan hands were speedy hands, I knew that well, and with the Deepworks paused again there were some two hundred pairs at work on this construction. Loquar’s hands were among them as we cut a path through the industry, but I didn’t think he spotted me. From the rubble of broken domiciles at the lowest point of the quarter, reassigned sappers quarried crude stone ammunition. While, beside that quarry, was a monster in the making.
“Big Spale” was its name, and its proportions were so big that it needed an adjoining tower of four platforms, not just as scaffolding during the construction, but to give access to the engineering teams that ran and maintained it in the field. The giant Treb-engine was over eighty feet tall; its core-artillery counterweight a huge square block of lead-stone, which gave the arm the power – they said – to hurl loads of over a tonne across a quarter of a mile. I saw the diagrams: there’d be a compliment of springer and ballistae mechanisms attached all up and down the tower. I wasn’t sure I believed those weights and distances but, while the rest of the engines would do damage to enemy ranks, it was clear that Big Spale had been designed to devastate them.
From the northern walls that afternoon I watched the blocks and lines of troops form up in columns on the plains. As they now dovetailed into a shape that faced out north, four thousand feet churned so much dust my view was tinted hazy orange. Too far away to make out sigils, flags of regimental standards stood out like pins on a moving board. Cavalry thundered down the front-lines of the host, while behind it vortans raised the night’s encampment. Tomorrow, war began.
‘For you there are two choices,’ said Rusper that evening. ‘Accompany me when I depart, to join in active service—’
‘Martial service?’ I spluttered back. ‘I’m not a fighter!’
Unruffled, he finished pouring his coffee from the samovar. ‘What it means is to serve the effort of the war as a guildsman, not a soldier. Jhendrit contingents remain behind front-lines, as you’d expect. If all goes well, that’s where they stay.’
He took a deep sip of the coffee and came to stand at the window beside me, looking out. His silence was filled up by the grumble of engine-wheels in city streets, as war machines – Trebs first – rolled slowly to the gates and plain below. I couldn’t see the fleets of oxen that drew them, only their axial zeniths floating above the Inner Wall like timber mountaintops through cloud.
‘But no line is ever unbreakable,’ said Rusper, cradling his cup. ‘And if our lines are broken, yes—to live, you’ll fight. And to defend. As we all will.’
He turned and watched me chew my lip. I wondered if I had the courage for that. Even after all the close brushes with death I’d had already, to go willingly into a task that might end up with me—me!—in a bloody battle, felt like a step of madness too far. The Rath were killers, they killed soldiers, and if I had to fight, I’d die, not being any kind of soldier. For Vorth, and in a small way for my people, I supposed, but was I ready to do that? Die for them?
‘And the other choice?’
Another sip. ‘Stay here,’ he said. ‘Aid the emergency Deepworks under Pintle, as her hand.’ From the view, he looked at me again; a serious look. ‘Deterioration at the Hub-wall is increasing only faster, and we’ve cause to believe the column’s lower buttresses are failing. If we don’t find a way to siphon off that flooding from the Spectres, then the Hub will collapse, taking with it our pipeworks and likely most of the Inner City.’
That sounded better. Not the Hub collapsing, but my helping Pintle to stop it. At least in the Deep I knew what I was doing and could be of use to someone. That would help the effort too.
But was it better, really? Without the Viceroy in the city – and no more Plamen to seal secret agreements – would I be safe? Amyra was now official aide to the Viceroyalty, not just in charge of the Iron Shield, and in Rusper’s absence that would leave the whole city in her hands. Could she take charge of the Deep too?
‘If you do remain,’ Rusper warned me then, as if reading my fears, ‘then you must stay in the Deep. All external duties are to be re-delegated to city guildsmen. Your people’s needs are in safe hands. On no account are you to venture to the surface or citadel, much less the districts. Not for anything, not at all.’ Lowering his face, he drew my eyes to his more sternly. ‘This you must promise me, Flint, can you do that?’
----------------------------------------
I left with him next morning.
Travelling with our wagon of chrozite, jezail cannons and frames was the first squad of twenty-five fusil-jhendra and a score of Mounted Spears led by Marszal Savhar. Also Gudgeon and his apprentice, Taflan, who I knew from errands. Khalyl the physician and two more citadel healers. Rusper rode his own horse at the head, a grey roan mare with a black ear, while Tazen rode aboard the wagon when not keeping up on foot. And then there was our blue-and-white escort: the pair of Shieldmen who rode behind and who I tried hard to ignore.
The army had marched north with the dawn, leaving the fortress almost empty of soldiers but for the handful of vortans who guarded the Hub, watching the water at all hours in case the Rath surfaced again. Wasted manpower; if Rath did rise, they’d stand no chance. But they weren’t going to, so I hoped we wouldn’t need those vortans.
Just as I hoped we wouldn’t need the full Laudassan battalion that hadn’t joined the army either; instead sent south, home, to Chidh Eshipas, to reinforce the second, false front of our war. Where Plamen supposedly lay dying. With that party went his horse. Caliph Bardon, I’d learned, would remain in the middle caliphies after all, serving as was his duty, but as Rusper’s remote second-in-command. I only wished I understood why Bardon seemed so special.
A sour-faced Khalyl had removed my leg-cast last night: the infection was gone and, at last, the wound was healing right. Still, he’d salved and bandaged it again—grumbling about the pointlessness of bothering if I was going to war—and given me a kit of bandage muslin, a jar of poultice and the kind request not to bother him anymore.
Going to war . . .
After a seven-hour ride, our party came to the encampment; four miles south and slightly west of Shen Drumbar. The army as a whole couldn’t move faster than the teams of oxen labouring to pull the heavy engines, so we weren’t long after them. It was a scene of clouds and peaks; the tall Treb-engines lording above the clustered white tents within the quadrant of patrols. Added in transit, I figured, a crow’s-nest soared at the summit of Big Spale’s tower.
‘Nothing yet sir,’ reported deputies in the command tent. It was much bigger than the bivouac Plamen had used on our mission, but still crowded and unbearably hot and stuffy. ‘Only screaming in the night. Damn near forgot their hellish racket.’
‘How many?’ asked Rusper. As if no more than an engineer, he wore his usual working surcoat and cap. Those goggles too, of course, the dark ones, to shield his eyes.
‘Hard to say. A hundred perhaps, mostly from the north.’
‘Flint?’
It was the last thing I expected to be addressed among the officers, and so soon. ‘Uh, yes . . . sir?’
With a wooden expression: ‘The shen, boy. Those numbers?’
Was he really asking me this in front of everyone? Not having a full sentence ready, I tripped over words: ‘More . . . the shen—I mean, two hundred probably. At least.’ So many important eyes on me. ‘But the tunnels under there could lead to another . . .’
‘Excuse my assistant,’ Rusper said to the audience of officers. ‘My campaign notes ought always to be fully memorised. Mustn’t have had his tonic.’
A wry smile as he said it won some laughter. Which hurt at first, but I masked it. He’d cut me off just as I’d been about to say “deep.”
‘Well then,’ he continued to the group, ‘it could just as easily have been a thousand.’
‘Smash it up,’ said Ferikh Quade who sat like a boulder mossed with armour, one hand propped on his cane. ‘Give the engines a stretch! Bombard the shen.’
‘Can we truly be resorting to such as that so early, Viceroy?’ said a slender man in fine leathers. I hadn’t recognised Caliph Arif out of his usual purple cloth.
Rusper calmed him with a hand, shaking his head, speaking to Quade: ‘I’ve given the Caliph my word, Drumbar will be left fully intact.’
Quade gave a throaty laugh to that. ‘This is war!’
But Rusper turned to someone else; the Methan Ferikh Iskandar – Bardon’s voice – who stood beside Marszal Savhar. Who hadn’t shared in the laughter at my expense a moment ago. ‘The riders of your Eighth are the swiftest,’ Rusper said. ‘They will ride to Shen Drumbar before first light, harry the town and withdraw. It may draw Rath towards us.’ No one objected. ‘Our strongest charge?’
All those who knew looked back to Quade, who nodded sagely. ‘Antissan Chantris.’
‘Good,’ said Rusper. ‘Chantris to be ready at the halfway mark.’
These orders given, the tent emptied of ferikhs and marszals. But before the caliphs could claim Rusper’s attention, I blurted out—‘Where do I go?’ Everyone seemed to know what they were doing except me!
‘Jhendrit contingent,’ Rusper bit off, ‘naturally. Report there.’ The caliphs closed around him.
As I left, I saw one officer was still here. It was Savhar: she held the tent-flap open for me and met my eyes as I passed.
Chaos. That’s what it looked like, even though I knew it was military order that I didn’t understand. Soldiers and those I used to know as Deepworkers teemed all over the site, and although there were patrols and several units taking quarters in formation around the business of the weapon-works and drills, there were no obvious places—not like in the Deep, where everything had its proper place—and the jhendrit contingent, to go by the locations of engines, was everywhere I looked. I did eventually find Gudgeon, who was in charge of us all, a kind of ferikh now himself; but though I wore my new blacks, boots and headdress, it was like he didn’t know me at all. Briskly he assigned me to “Fifth Pulls.”
‘Don’t I get a fusil?’ I asked while I still had a chance.
‘Not enough, not yet,’ he said.
My first job had nothing to do with engines. As the high heat of the day turned from a swelter to a bake, I was teamed with three others, all Royal Guild apprentices older than me, and sent two miles—on foot—to mark the dawn’s deployment zone. We had to jog not walk, said Gudgeon, even with the yellow picket flags pinned under our arms. Following flares from the crow’s-nest of Big Spale, which signalled orders from Ferikh Quade, we flagged a quad in the brown earth.
It was back to three sips of water in the morning, five at midday and three again at dusk. That first dusk crept over the camp and fires were lit. Back to rations of khapent as well, but that wasn’t so bad. Taflan showed me where we’d sleep; not in closed tents but big shared spaces under canvas, warmed by sheltered coal-burners. I’d not brought blankets of my own—why hadn’t Rusper told me to?—and so she let me share her blanket. That night was cold but I got some sleep.
As planned, the Methans rode northeast in darkness, followed shortly by the Antissans. I’d wanted to see it, this powerful troop of armour-plated charging cavalry who fought with ten-foot spears called chantris, but by the time I’d made my way to the edge of camp, they’d already left. And Big Spale’s tower was too crowded for me to climb up for a view. It was still dark when the command line formed its buffer of vortans and crossbows along that edge. Unable to see anything at all past those heads and shoulders, I reported to my unit. But our contingent had no orders; engines at ease.
Grey light filtered over gypsum. The sounds that carried from a distance were hard to make sense of, but I heard the drumming of the hooves, high peals of horses, shouted orders. Even when the noises came from nearer and we could hear urgent commands being shouted on Big Spale, I couldn’t understand them.
The mounted units returned.
It had been a disaster. Twenty-two soldiers had been killed in that first fight on the Verunian farmlands, and many more were injured. Rath had emerged from the direction of the shen, as they’d hoped, but if I’d heard right, another two groups had surfaced somewhere in between the cavalries, which cut them off from one another. The Methan riders had been caught between the bands, forced to fight free of a sudden tangle that had closed in out of nowhere.
Caliphs took Rusper to task: ‘We were led to believe that we might wisely defer to your judgement, Viceroy, that your special knowledge of the enemy may yield some new advantage. Yet here you drive our finest straight into a gauntlet!’
Rusper accepted this with grace I hadn’t seen in him before, and admitted that his plan had been hopeful and hasty. If manpower was to last, he said, he couldn’t afford to risk another confrontation of the kind.
‘With respect,’ said a ferikh, ‘we must still put maximum force behind offensive action, early in the fight.’
Iskandar, the Methan Ferikh for whom the clash had been most costly, disagreed: ‘For this campaign to succeed, sir, you must locate and secure a strong, defensible position.’
I couldn’t say it out-loud, but knew that that position didn’t exist. As long as they could undercut our movements in the desert, the Rath would always have the edge.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
But either way, Rusper had to make some decision. ‘March on Shen Drumbar,’ he said.
The outer edge of the shen’s basin was reached by the next midmorning and a new camp raised on those dead farms. I tried not to think about what had happened the last time I’d been here as the engines, our Fifth Pulls unit included, rolled out into frontal positions five hundred yards from the first houses.
My unit was made up of three Pulls: wagon-sized catapults able to adjust range and direction of fire without moving position. Each one was operated by a team of seven jhendra: two “stoneholds” to mind and move and load the stone, two “winchers” – one to each side – to work the torsion-bar levers, a “crank” who ran the range-rail, a “pivot” who turned the pull-arm’s axis and, with his eye on the field and hand on the release-beam, a “foreman”, firing from stern.
I wasn’t strong enough to be a wincher or a stonehold. But being small – a perfect size for the tiny “rail-hole” – I was the natural choice for crank. That put me in the engine body, right under the firing arm itself and moving with it as and when it was rotated on its axis. In there, belly-flat, or at best crouching, I’d have to quickly switch the position of the range-hook along a lateral rail. That controlled the range of fire. I also had to keep an eye on the torsion-bar, making sure the tightly-wound ropes were always greased, never fraying.
At first, one of the two squads of fusil-jhendra fired blind schot to provoke movement from the shen. But when there wasn’t any movement, nor even sight or sound of Rath, engines were put to use. Mules, which couldn’t change range or direction like us, but threw much heavier loads, now hurled their heaviest rocks and broken hunks of masonry to fall some hundred yards or less from Drumbar’s edge. True to their name, they kicked like donkeys with the force of propulsion, the air soon filled up with swoop-and-thud.
‘I want them in daylight!’ I heard Rusper bark at someone, clearly annoyed at the waste of rubble which smashed on impact. The day was wearing on, and not one Ratheine spear seen. If they were down there, though, I knew, then he was trying to stir them. Dutifully I waited with my team behind our Pull, nervous of the moment when those fierce shouts of command would be directed at us too and we’d have to join the battery. But by the afternoon, the slopes peppered with fragments, Rusper called ceasefire.
The little windows seemed to stare back at our line, stunned, in the hush. But no Rath came. Pegging his hopes on the night, Rusper manned the beacon-dotted boundaries of the camp with crossbow troops, pulling the engines back again to a range of six hundred yards. All jhendrit units, including mine, were ordered to hold their positions.
Darkness brought cold wind. I warmed myself at our torches. And in the icy-taut silence that reigned on the firing line, we heard the gibbers long before they scattered out onto the slopes. At an order from behind, our foreman sent us to our posts. Against the wind, I caught the tail-end of: ‘. . . at will!’
And panicked. Was that for us? My eyes were darting, face to face, and though I couldn’t see a thing through all the darkness past the line, all I could see in my mind now were Rath legs sprinting towards us.
But the command was repeated, marszal to artabh, down the line. It was the Mules again, I thought, who’d just been ordered to fire, but as I saw their half-lit chunks of rock go flying, I sensed the urgent energy among the jhendra of our teams.
And then, ‘All pulls!’ from close by. ‘Load!’
I crawled inside and braced myself while the others readied in their places.
‘Full fire!’ I gritted teeth and bunched my muscles. Winch-levers heaved, those skeins of twisted rope creaked, the arm above me groaned with glee. And then the whole thing bucked and shook me and I watched our stone fly from the firelight. It soared to join the rocky hail and as the terror-shadows waxed over the light, the thump of landings mixed with screeches.
‘Springers, fire at will!’ belted a farther marszal, and to a chorus of cracks like breaking trees, the smaller stones flew to thicken the Mules’ hail of free-fire.
And now I saw them; the first Rath in that first knot, with three more groups scattering behind as numbers fanned. My heart pumped acid and, suddenly helpless against the fear, I shimmied backwards from the rail-hole.
I climbed out of the machine. I heard the voices—‘What’s he doing?’—‘That’s our crank!’—‘Eya, crank boy, what—’ and Tazen barking somewhere, but fled the eyes and pinned my own to the narrow gap between two blocks of standing cavalry and crossbows behind us.
‘Crank-boy, back in your position!’ someone shouted at me, just as our line Artabh roared, ‘Pullers reload!’ so loudly that I flinched and stopped and froze.
In frozen terror, wanting only to be somewhere far away, I heard the heft of our next load, the busy motions, creaks and groans of our machine re-gearing, then cringed again—with my whole body—at the second shout of ‘Full fire now!’
The volley’s noise thrummed through my bones. I turned my body round enough to see the first Rath, now safe from the Mules and Pulls, ripping up the slope towards the middle of the line. Those behind them spread for the flanks. In the chaos of more shouting from our foreman—shouts at me—a firm hand pushed me to my knees. A voice rasped, ‘Down!’ in my ear.
I saw the other jhendra kneeling too, then a stuttering volley of crossbow bolts was going over our heads.
‘Springers reload!’ Was that Rusper again? ‘Crossbows at will!’
‘Stay down!’ rasped whoever had pushed me down, and I did. But as I squinted through the torch-glare ahead, the Rath were already dispersing. Whiplash of ongoing Springers, thud of rocks and spit of bolts filled up the night. Through all the noise I heard the screams and then the thundering of hooves over the earth around us.
Loquar unhanded my shoulder. I stood to watch the mounted troops charge through our firing-lines and down the slope towards Shen Drumbar. Straight through the rest of the rabble, carving, slicing, destroying.
‘Man your stations,’ came another shout when they’d come back. It was Rusper; I saw him now, striding behind the line with Iskandar. ‘Man your stations, more will come.’
I hadn’t manned my station. The shame that crashed into me for that, for trying to run, almost made me want to run again. But the most I got from my team and foreman were glares. Loquar had said something, I guessed.
I’d have to steel my nerve, I knew.
But now the night was quiet. We waited, numbed to the openness by the black veil just past the beacons. More didn’t come. All through that night, and the next day, the shen mocked us with its stillness. I suffered badly from the heat that day, but had at least learned from the mission to keep my mind away from thirst. Then at dusk, Rusper gave the word: ‘Storm the shen.’
The place was empty. By message from High Command, I was dispatched with twenty mounted scimitars, a fusilier squad and Arif himself, to inspect the Caliph’s house. The dog came too. But the ruptured cellar of the mansion was as hollow and silent as if it had been abandoned for ten years. They never settled at this place, was all I put in my message back. All I could be sure of.
But no sooner had the troops returned to camp above the basin, than the lookout on Big Spale cried: ‘Southwest!’
This time I did it—scaled the tower. I took the ladders to the third platform and, sure enough, just west of southwest, there was a multitude moving. We had provoked them. Not from the shen, as we’d meant to, but from behind. Through the Roads. Outside of dreams and visions, it was more Rath than I’d ever seen all in one place.
Through the mixed noise of activity on the Spale and, below, the wide reactions of the army, I heard Gudgeon. ‘We won’t have time for an effective battery,’ he was warning as he followed Rusper up those same rungs, past my platform.
‘Then we mount the best we can,’ Rusper replied, making for the top. ‘I want this rack moving right now!’
Whips cracked. Oxen moaned. Engineers swarmed the tower of Big Spale which now rocked, rumbling, in a slow about-turn. It crawled southwest. Around its path, units of infantry, artillery, cavalry and engines moved on their orders as we turned our faces to the threat. The high tenor of commands from the artabhi on all sides were overwhelming: I could only hold onto the closest beam and try to keep out of the way. I scanned the other engines I could see, searching for Fifth Pulls’ location, but couldn’t find them.
Two bodies of riders with spears surged to make a wide line ahead. Not Antissan . . . didn’t matter. The sight of them shaved off a thin layer of fear.
The swarm was close; a grotesque, formless, seething mass of feral rage. So many throats all screeching, wailing, whooping, howling, not as one—just in one place—though bands and rabbles could be seen breaking from the sides.
‘Arm the Spale!’ roared Quade’s big voice from the ground.
All around me jhendra hurried to brace the framework with its chains and tethers. Taflan was here too! She glanced at me, wide-eyed, while wrapping tether-lines around her wrists and squaring up behind a partner. ‘You shouldn’t be here, Florian!’ I heard the fear in her voice though, and sensed it in all the others’. Had they seen hordes like this before?
‘Load!’ Through my feet, I felt the heave of many stoneholds; some massive weight fall into place, and as the Spale and tower rocked, looked back through posts, lintels and chains to see more blocks of mounted soldiers forming up, behind, beside us.
Two sudden sounds jolted my knees into a crouch; first a sharp shower of bolts from crossbows somewhere to the left, then from the right a grating drag-and-smack of bigger engines firing. Face hard-up against my beam, I looked that way—the Trebs had fired and there were boulders in the air, but legs and arms of engineers blocked my view of their landing. I heard crashes, but no screaming through the chaos of more orders from everywhere. Maybe Rusper’s shouting too, for just a second, overhead.
‘Steady . . .’ came Quade’s strong rumble through the noise. He was the voice of this machine. And in my bones I could feel the tension building through the body of the beast. ‘Steady . . . hold fast, boys and girls . . .’ Grips and stances tightened; through the windows of legs and arms and beams and lines I watched a part of the Rath wave fanning closer, spreading now as if each creature ran alone. No more than two hundred yards off.
‘LOOSE!’
That huge weight fell through the Spale’s ribcage. The ballast plunged right past my face like a great fishing net of lead and then the arm launched with such force that the whole structure, tower and all, must surely lurch and topple face-first to the ground. It did lurch—hard—and everyone aboard swayed back on held lines. Then something jolted it back. The sling vanished, swung ahead of the release-pin and cast its load from ringing chains. A boulder about the size of a common house flew through the sky as if it weighed nothing at all. It fell and forged into the tide, ploughing on through the denser numbers behind it and disappearing into a miasma of dust and flung Rath bodies.
A cheer went up from the ranks, but like a stemmed current the Rath surged round the impact.
Crossbows opened fire on them, as did the Trebs, though their last volley came too soon; the engines, some unprepared, fired out of unison. Rath scattered from the path of their rocks.
Pulls hadn’t fired. Weren’t going to now, I guessed, and the thought that it must be my fault ricocheted around my head. Hands sped to re-secure the Spale but there wasn’t time. Rusper’s rapid words rasped through the timber ceiling, but Iskandar’s voice was louder, clearer: ‘Front cavalry—advance!’
Time was up, they were on us now and I didn’t want to see. I heard ‘Crossbows fall back!’ and the smart jog of those units, the drum of hooves in formation, gaining speed, and hellish Ratheine screams that must be all around us now. Now that the jhendra stood at ease, I got up, pushed away from the beam and launched myself onto the ladder, heading down.
Then changed my mind and climbed back up towards the top. But before I got to the highest platform where Rusper was, the adjutants warded me back. So down I went.
I was hiding, I knew, blocking my view to the battle behind the standing frontal line, not really looking for my unit. Every time I passed a gap in the formations of the line and glimpsed a moment of the combat—churn of dust and berserk swarm around the rearing, screaming horses, riders dragged out of their saddles—I looked away.
But I found my unit. Fifth Pulls had been behind the block of Trebs, and as the fighting raged out there, my foreman grabbed me by the arm and took me straight to Gudgeon. Third, Fourth and Fifth Pulls had all had orders to stand ready. And even though they hadn’t got firing orders, if they had, then their eastward-angled position would have meant my role as crank was crucial. Fifth had stood down, replaced by First. Gudgeon, too distracted to really give the matter time, gave me a martial warning: first stroke against my rank of jhendrit. ‘That’s you off lightly.’
Scattered cheers ran down the line. The noise of battle gave way to the even more chaotic noise and bustle of the battle’s aftermath. I made for the command tent, wanting nothing less than a chance to see the bodies dead on the ground or being dragged back for the pyre—Vedan or Rath, I didn’t care! I crawled under the tent’s back canvas and there made small in a corner. Even smaller when I saw the Shieldman watching from a chair. A tirade waited for Rusper again, even as the crashes of last Treb-fire could be heard out on the field.
‘Eighty soldiers and a fine marszal slain in a single night!’ railed a caliph. Shad, I thought.
Ruddy-faced and shining, ‘It was unexpected,’ said Rusper.
‘Verunia’s a dead-end, Viceroy,’ said Iskandar who had been with him on Big Spale. ‘We must move from here.’
Rusper took off his goggles. I flinched at the colour of the skin around his eyes as the lids fluttered, adjusting: two rings of clean and clammy pink in dusty brown. He looked at one of the Antissan marszals whose eyes still glistened, I guessed, for a fallen comrade. He said, ‘Could’ve sworn some of those Rath were wounded already when we engaged.’
‘Bolts?’ said Quade.
‘No eferikh, blade-strokes.’
‘I saw the same, sir,’ said Savhar as she nursed her bloody knuckles. Had she been using her fists? ‘They’d fought not long before tonight.’
Moans of the wounded wafted in from outside. People were dying already, and more still were going to. Rusper replaced his goggles, which found me. I nodded back at the black lenses, knowing full-well that the Rath from Shen Drumbar had cut right underneath us, through the hidden Roads, stirring added numbers on the way as they’d rounded. And it would happen again.
‘Prepare to break camp,’ he said as he made up his mind. ‘And Flint, get together a team of sappers. We’ve pitch and asphalt. Seal that tunnel.’
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One plugged hole behind us – first of who-could-guess how many more that needed plugging – the army churned southwest next morning; back the way it had marched. The second squad of fusil-jhendra met our column at midday, as our rank-and-file marched, rode and trundled, the oxen drawing the engines achingly over farmlands. With that squad – I later heard in a stolen moment with Rusper – came a message from Captain Mondric.
The Flag-Senera held the order of the city in Rusper’s place. As agreed. But it was proving a strange, tense balance between the guards and Shieldmen. The Satrap slept on in his tower. But even without caliphs to play with, Mondric wrote, she seemed to pull on other strings within the city, perhaps her contacts in Ered? Antissan citizens were unsettled, confused, and so was the Sanhedrin. Meanwhile, imprisoned in that dungeon, Hetch had started to sing deliriously at every hour of day and night about “dead High Commander Plamen” and “lying Viceroy Symphin.” Had he gone mad now too, I wondered? No, I doubted it somehow. So far, at least, his songs were heard only be the twenty guards who manned his secret cell, with splitting headaches.
Pintle reported: the Hub still held.
As we moved back through the wide mouth between the two northern ergs, scouts were sent in all directions. I only hoped not as far as the Spectres. What would they think if they saw those lights blazing there, up on that crag? How would we explain it?
If they were still there, I thought.
Because Gudgeon was on Big Spale with High Command, Taflan ferried Rusper’s messages to me. Quick-fire questions in his wild shorthand, scribbled map-plans, hard to read and so frustrating. Given what we knew—what I knew—how many Rath might be here? Might there be greater numbers there? Might here be interlinked with there? Might any number of Rath travel here to here in daylight?
I did my best with my replies, hard as it was to draw map-plans of my own while on the move. Annoyed, I snapped at Taflan twice, looking daggers at that stupid little gazebo on the tower. Why couldn’t I just go up there too? Was it because of the caliphs, or the Shieldman?
Between the two belts of the erg, the open passage gradually narrowed towards the south. Its narrowest point came just three miles before the south opening; about six miles from belt to belt. As we approached, I was called up to the high platform, where now under the gazebo only Quade and Iskandar sat with Rusper. An adjutant poured me a cup of water, which I willed myself not to gulp down at once. Or spill, for that matter, what with the platform’s constant jolts, lurches and sways.
On the chart-table was spread a map of the northern desert. A flagged pin stood in Shen Drumbar, with a count or tally of some kind scrawled close to it. A small clay model of Big Spale showed where we were right at this moment, in the passage of the ergs. The location of the Spectres was marked, unlike the dune-buried ruins, but that position had no flag-pin or numbers scrawled underneath. I guessed that meant the caliphs and ferikhs didn’t know what was really there, at least not yet.
Questions were asked, things I thought I’d answered. I wondered what Rusper’s explanation was for why I had this knowledge. Did these men know about the mission? Or about Plamen’s fate?
Rusper chewed something, adjusted goggles and leaned forward. ‘What we want to know,’ he said, ‘is whether it’s likely, even possible, that Rath may move onto the surface south of here, and here, and here.’
I leaned in close to see the points his oily finger was prodding, just as the tower rocked so hard I slammed my nose into the table. I came up holding it and, hoping no one had noticed, scanned the map. I saw a path traced by those points, a path across the northward opening of the passage we were in—then up, northwest, along a kind of duneless inlet. Ending just east of the Spectres.
A passage into a passage.
And yes, why wouldn’t Rath come up south of those points? There, just before the right-hand edge, was Calvallagh. Miles further south, and they’d surfaced there, hadn’t they! They’d left their caves, we’d seen it.
‘We only hope,’ Rusper continued, ‘it won’t be too far to draw them in daylight. Here.’ And he stroked his finger down across the narrow part of the erg-passage. It was a distance: twenty miles or more from the farthest of the three points, and we all knew they hated sunlight. If it was the numbers from the Spectres, or the Spectres and Shen Drumbar farmlands, that he wanted to draw out. . . and funnel down . . .
‘It’s possible,’ I said, ‘maybe.’ Quade’s eyes were magnets to my face. Iskandar’s were too, but easier to meet. ‘But we’d have to keep them moving, somehow.’
‘Or draw by night,’ Rusper said.
‘Can’t do that,’ muttered Quade. ‘Can’t light the erg-passage for engine-fire.’
‘Nor secure a front-line if we’re blind,’ said Iskandar.
‘They still could come this far by night,’ I dared to add, drawing their eyes.
Not Rusper’s though. ‘They could,’ he said. ‘We shall soon see. Ekharan, we move to form the line.’ He grabbed a graphite stub and drew it, thick and black.
At dusk we halted there. The army turned its face northwest again. Made camp. I woke next morning to the shouting, grinding, thrumming, stretching line as it took shape.
From the northwest to the southeast, with the wide expanse of Antissa’s gypsum plains behind us, the troops and engines were deployed in wide-spaced stations across the yellow-white, to span the breadth of the passage. They were the basis of the line, although their positions were small comfort when, at a glance, each block-like station was adrift in the expanse. The right dune-slopes were tall for miles, sheer in some places like a wall. Those on the left were shallower – edge of a smaller island of the dunescape – and offered far less protection from any night-crawling Rath, should they come from there.
On duty with my unit as we went north up the line, I watched the fusil squads move out to their own orders, envying them. What could those orders be? I was still scared. But ever since Verunia, I’d been remembering the feeling, the thrill I’d had down in the deep under the Spectres, back-to-back with Plamen, seeing chalk-flesh blasted by schot from the fusil I fired. I wanted to feel that again. Wanted to shoot something, and kill it. In the overpowering heat, the thought repeated in my mind.
Fifth Pulls’ position was three stations from the line’s northern end, soldiered by units of the Methan and Ospégan Regiments. Next along, three hundred yards both left and right, were blocks of Trebs backed by mounted troops. Just as we did, probably, their distant clusters in the void looked fragile, tiny and exposed. What if . . . ?
But that wasn’t the plan. No, the plan was a funnel. We’d draw them up and out, towards us. To a rain of engine-fire. No Rath should get anywhere near us.
‘You’ve got a fusil!’ I railed at Taflan. As we now sat about the ammunition load, eating khapent and slowly sipping at our water, I could see it: holstered at her hip, a hooked handle.
‘I’m Gudgeon’s apprentice.’ She cloaked it with her cape.
‘I’m Rusper’s—’
I checked myself: but I wasn’t. Never had been. Taflan knew that. Looking over her hair, bound at the top of her head where it sprouted out like a pot-plant, then at her bright eyes, I knew she must be much braver than me. Sure, I wasn’t anyone’s apprentice, but . . . none of this would be happening if not for me. I’d have a weapon if only I wasn’t such a coward.
‘It’s okay,’ she said. And smiled. ‘I got your back, Florian.’
Her smile was nice.
For hours that night I lay awake between Taflan and Tazen. Listened hard, but heard no Rath. This time I’d do my duty right. For Rusper, Vorth, my people. All of them. And none, I thought. I only knew I had to do it. After all, I wasn’t fighting—I was crouching in a hole and shifting hooks along a rung! In a machine.
On the front line. The only line.
The Ergmouth Line. That’s what we were calling it soon.