They were a fraction of the size of the first eradicator, each roughly as tall as a mounted trooper when they ran hunched over, their false coatings of dust and ashes billowing in their wake. But what they lacked in mass they more than made up for with ferocious speed and an extra pair of folding swords. They struck the scattered cavalrymen from three sides at once, each eradicator a whirling cyclone that dismembered men and steeds with equal alacrity.

Order and cohesion all but dissolved on the spot. Frightened hornblowers shied and threw their riders, the cavalrymen taking off in every direction in a mad scramble for self-preservation. Ven tried to break free of the mosh pit and ate a kick from a hornblower as it took off, dragging its hapless master across the ground still tangled in his stirrups. With her ears ringing and her head in the clouds Ven heard a muffled thump nearby as a drakenguard discharged his shotgun at an eradicator, the wide cone of pellets deflecting harmlessly from its tibia to maim his comrades on either side of the monster. They toppled from their saddles only to be dispatched where they lay, the eradicator delivering a dual coup de grace with one pair of folding swords while impaling the shotgunner in the gap beneath his cuirass, lifting him screaming on the point of its blades directly above her. The swords scissored together and Ven was bathed in the man’s warm entrails. She couldn’t see, didn’t know which way to crawl to safety or where her comrades had run off to—she was going to die here amidst this roiling confusion, drown in the sea of carnage.

A rough hand seized her by the collar and lifted her clear. Ven pawed at her congealed visor and found herself draped across Caitliff’s saddle horn, the captain stabbing her spurs into her mount’s bleeding flanks to goad it on. Caitliff was leading a posse of drakenguard that she had managed to bring back under control.

“Parting shot!” Caitliff slashed her hat through the air, describing wide semicircles, “Parting shot! Give them the runaround!”

Hearing this command, the surviving drakenguard began to extricate themselves from the melee that had ensued, showing superb discipline as they drew away, turning their bodies and using both hands to fire at the oncoming eradicators while guiding their mounts with only the skillful use of their stirrups. Most of the hornblowers were fast enough to keep out of the reach of those deadly creatures. Left behind were the slow and the dead, a knot of them forming around the corpse of the slain eradicator. Ven saw that her platoon had fixed bayonets and assembled a hasty square together with some dismounted drakenguard, Deschane dragging a wounded rider to safety within the formation. For the moment the ashen eradicators were wholly fixated with catching Caitliff’s elusive riders, but Ven knew that the square would be overrun within moments if the enemy took notice of them.

“Keep up, Iraiah! You’re falling behind,” Caitliff called back to one of her officers. It was the young idiot with the flower in his breast pocket—his hornblower had lost a wing during the skirmish and was hovering sideways like a drunken bumblebee. An ashen eradicator pounced upon the wounded mount, its folding swords closing around the hornblower’s hindlegs and simply pulling them off. Iraiah pitched forward face first into the mud with an ominous crunch.

“Typical,” Caitliff hissed, wheeling back around, “Ruddy typical. Hold onto this a moment, corporal,”

Caitliff thrust the reigns into Ven’s hand and took her tri-barreled shotgun in both of hers Then she charged the ashen eradicator head-on. The eradicator saw her coming and hunched over behind the cover of its armoured forelegs. Her first shot tore off a bit of the creature’s antennae. Undeterred, it sprinted forward to meet her halfway, two of its dripping swords held eagerly aloft.

“Aim low, skipper,” Ven said groggily, “It’s vulnerable in the sternites or the joints of its legs.”

Caitliff nodded and raked its underbelly with her next barrel. The eradicator sagged as if gut shot, lowering its shielding limbs to protect its abdomen just in time to catch her last shot straight in the kisser. Disoriented and with most of its face hanging off the side of its head, the creature trammelled forward in a wild berserk’s flurry, lashing out at everything within reach.

“Up, corporal! Take us up!” Caitliff screeched. Ven did as she was told and yanked on the reigns for all she was worth. The hornblower leapt as if on spring-toed boots, the tips of its spurred feet coming within a hairsbreadth of the eradicator’s threshing swords.

The beast came crashing back down beside the unconscious Iraiah, Ven’s head bounced hard against stirrups. She and Caitliff slipped off the hornblower and lashed Iraiah onto its back before remounting and once again took flight.

Their hornblower was noticeably sluggish by now, the spiracles along the sides of its body hissing like steam lines as it struggled to carry their combined weight. All the mounts were beginning to tire in earnest as they led the eradicators on a breakneck chase across the clearing, the gap between them narrowing with every passing moment.

Several more drakenguard were run down and eviscerated by their relentless pursuers. Caitliff passed Iraiah off to another rider to lessen the weight. Then she made a beeline for the infantry square and addressed Deschane:

“My riders can’t keep this pace up forever. Either we stand and fight or we make a break for the river and hope the cannons can cover our retreat.”

“They’ll cut us down in droves if we run,” Deschane said, busy tying off a tourniquet around a drakenguard’s gushing stump, “No, I say we stick to the plan. Lead them into our square and withdraw while you still can. We’ll stay and adjust the artillery fire with coloured smoke.”

“You’re insane!” Caitliff protested, “If these things don’t get you, Shylo’s guns surely will!”

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“One can hardly be worse than the other.”

“Comes with the job, don’t it?” Pretty Boy jibed, “Get out of here and take our corporal with you. G’wan now—git!”

Before Ven could object Pretty Boy smacked the rump of Caitliff’s mount with the flat of his backsword. It veered away, the captain spouting a string of unladylike adjectives as it carried her and Ven along.

Nevertheless, Caitliff did rally her dispersed drakenguard. Together they coaxed the ashen eradicators directly into the path of the infantry square, Deschane greeting them with a concentrated salvo of small arms fire. As Ven’s faced bounced against the stirrups she saw Cooly’s shoulder cannon nail one of the eradicators with a superb shot that cored out its abdomen from stern to stem, immobilizing its lower body. The other two eradicators did a curious thing then, breaking off their attack to close ranks around their stricken brethren and shield it with their own limbs.

“Beans, now!” came Deschane’s distant cry.

Beans stepped forward with porcelain balls in hand, tearing off the rubber caps to expose the fuses. The demolition man sparked the match head ends of the fuses then lobbed the irritant grenades at the eradicators, orange puffs of smoke appearing after the loud retort of their blasting caps. Moments later they heard the brass notes of the cannons singing from the other side of the Foss. The shells threw up fountains of earthen clods where they landed, each one briefly dispersing the sulphurous clouds with hissing shrapnel, concealing the

Their job done, the drakenguard started back across the river. Behind them the sound of musketry continued, intermixed with the shriek of flying shells and the cries of stricken men.

Her people was dying back there, Ven realized. She couldn’t let that happen, not while she had an ounce of strength left in her.

“Take me back,” Ven groaned, “Captain, you’ve got to take me back.”

“Don’t be absurd, girl. You can hardly stand. As for your friends, they’re doing their part,” Caitliff gave her flagging hornblower another boot in the guts, “They made their choice.”

“Aye, they did,” Ven gripped Caitliff by the rim of her steel gorget, “Now let me make mine.”

“Of all the blasted cheek,” the captain swore suddenly, prying Ven’s fingers away with preoccupied irritation, “Tell me when to run, will he? I should bloody well think not!”

Caitliff turned to her rider and held up a mailed fist.

“Come on you wastrels, you war-pigs, you vagabonds and vermin!” she roared, “Let’s go save those sorry sonsofbitches!”

For a second time the captain swung her steed around and headed straight back into the fray, her drakenguard galloping after her. Ven dragged herself to a side-saddle position and held on for dear life as the panting hornblower plunged into the fog of war. They leapt over a freshly steaming shell crater and saw a spread of gibbets and shattered chitin where an eradicator had once stood. Meters from it away was a thrashing figure that resolved itself into a knot of five soldiers locked in a mortal struggle with a wounded eradicator that clearly wanted nothing more than to escape. Those troopers still alive were trying to plunge their bayonets into the gaps of its exoskeleton, while the dead hung impaled upon the monster’s switchblade forelimbs, dragging it down with the weight of their clinging bodies. Beans and Pretty Boy straddled the eradicator’s back to prevent it from unfurling its wings, the serjeant-major hollered clubbing at it ineffectually with the pommel of his backsword, the blade of which had snapped off at the hilt.

“Ven?” Pretty Boy was furious, “What are you doing here? Caitliff, I thought I told you to—”

“You thought wrong,” Caitliff barked.

The captain let out a low, trilling whistle that Ven could barely hear through the cloth of her facepiece. But its effect on her steed was instantaneous. With a tired shuffle of its wings, the hornblower executed a sharp turn and lashed out with its spiked legs. The blow caught the eradicator on the flank and threw it onto its side, exposing bleeding chinks in its armour thorax spalled by bombshell fragments. The troopers grappling with it went rolling into the much along with it, with the sole exception of Pretty Boy who landed nimbly on the balls of his toes. The swordsman darted in and rammed his broken blade through a weak point and levering the wound wide open before a flailing leg

It was then that Beans stepped forward with a sulphur grenade in his fist.

“You ain’t getting away this time. Up yours, you bug-eyed bastard!” Beans yanked off the rubber cap and sparking the matchhead fuse against the eradicator’s own scabrous hide. The demolitions man punched the bomb into the gaping mess. The eradicator shuddered and gave a final spasmodic slash of its folding swords. Beans flinched, yet miraculously stayed upright as Ven and the captain went spilling into the bloody muck, the captain’s mount gutted in an instant. With both her legs trapped beneath the hornblower and sinking fast, Ven would have made easy prey for the eradicator if it hadn’t been so hellbent on survival.

It shrugged off the remaining troopers by dragging itself upright and wobbled away as fast as its stilt legs could take it. What remained of Deschane’s infantry square slowly tottered out of the devastation in ones and twos, each trooper wearing that look of glazed numbness that followed the very worst battles on the surface.

Pretty Boy helped Caitliff and Ven back onto their feet. Together they watched as in the distance some drakenguard kept up a faltering pursuit of the foe. Wounded as it was the ashen eradicator was fast enough to eventually outpace the exhausted cavalry, the hole in its side trailing a plume of bright sickly smoke like the smokestack of a chugging engine as it neared the edge of the treeline.

“Think they’ll get him?” Ven asked, too dazed to care much either way.

“At this range?” Beans scoffed, “With rifled twelve-pounders? They can’t miss.”

A heartbeat later there came the sound of Shylo’s cannons firing in concert from across the Foss. Three cotton puffs appeared on the edge of the clearing and rubbed the creature from the face of the earth.

“What did I tell you?” Beans laughed softly, sinking slowly to his knees, “Old Beansie don’t know much, but I do know my…I do know my…”

Beans shook his head as if he was having trouble finding the words.

“Steady on there, man!” cried Pretty Boy as the demolition man tottered, clutching at the side of his neck, where an arterial river had begun cascading down the front of his chest. Ven hastened to his side, cutting off the sleeves of Beans’ sealant suit with her bayonet and wadding it up to stem the bleeding.

All too late. The eradicator’s sword had only grazed him, really. But that was enough.

“Stay with us Beans,” Pretty Boy pleaded, pressing the soaked and already useless bandage against the fatal cut. Doyd tore off the demo man’s gasmask and slapped Beans’ pale cheeks, “Don’t fall asleep, whatever you do. Beans? Beans!”

Beans peered over Doyd’s shoulder at Ven, a look of rising confusion on his face.

“Say, I know you,” Bean’s eyes blurred, creasing over in a faint smile, “We’re friends, ain’t we?”

“Aye,” Ven said with a slight catch in her breath, “Course I am. We’re all your friends here, Beans.”

“Ah. That’s good, then,” Beans nodded as if that made everything alright, “That’s good.”

Then he stiffened a bit in Doyd’s arms, and that was that.