Dawn (47 page)

A machine passed directly above O’Gan, the Krote on its back slashing at the air. O’Gan rose and hacked with his sword, catching a trailing tentacle and parting it from its home. The flapping thing fell to the ground, a spartlet attached and jabbing again and again with its freshly exposed fangs.

“At them!” O’Gan shouted, but the call was not needed. The Shantasi were on their feet, loosing arrows and bolts at the confused shapes. The sustained firepower of almost two thousand weapons gave the Krotes plenty more to worry about.

The fire-shitting machine collided with another, and they impacted heavily into a copse of dead trees. Fire rolled along the ground as the machine ruptured, and its thrashing limbs were blasted across the battlefield as huge, flickering shadows. The survivor from the other machine dashed from the fire and took on several Shantasi, cutting them down with a slideshock and several throwing stars before more came to their aid. They drove him down with sheer volume of numbers, and O’Gan saw glittering swords dulled as blood smeared their blades.

Another machine fell farther away, rolling over the ground with the crumple of folding metal. Its rider was crushed beneath it, but the machine rose on unsteady legs, thrashing out with blades as long as five men. Several warriors ducked beneath the blades and went in close, their own swords at the ready. The machine glowed blue, light burst from it in a pulse and O’Gan saw the skeletons of the Shantasi crumple as the strange fire faded again.

He ran toward the machine with other warriors, sword and other weapons at the ready.

There were a dozen machines still circling above them. Several still poured hails of arrows or fireballs down at the Shantasi, but mostly they seemed more concerned with the spartlets attacking in droves. Another machine fell, its wings tattered, its rider drifting away and striking the ground a few steps from his mount. Neither rose again.

“Use poison sacs!” O’Gan shouted as he approached the heavily bladed construct. It was starting to glow again, a blue umber that cast strange shadows beneath its low stomach. “Don’t get too close! See if the poison will do it!” He stood back while three Shantasi lobbed poison sacs in carefully judged arcs. One of them burst on the machine’s slashing blades, but the other two struck its body, spraying across several globes that could have been eyes. It dipped as it tried to wipe the affected area against the ground. The Shantasi darted in with blades drawn.

O’Gan readied himself to be wiped out.
Magic did that,
he thought, running past the scattered bones of the original attackers. But though the machine still glowed, the pulse did not come. O’Gan and the warriors hacked at its underbelly, keeping close so that they stayed within its killing circle, using Pace now and then to move out of the way of its rolling body. One of them leapt onto its back and buried a spear to its full depth.

The machine grew still, and they thought they might have won.

But then it went mad. As its end closed in, the machine began to roll and thrash in a final venting of fury. The Shantasi on its back was cut in two by a swinging blade, her head and shoulders tumbling to the ground and being kicked toward O’Gan by the machine’s thrashing legs.

“Back!” O’Gan shouted, unable to take his eyes from the surprised expression on the dead woman’s face. She ran a fruit shop not far from the Temple in Hess.
Not even a trained warrior, and look what she did.
Disgusted, terrified and shocked, still in that moment O’Gan believed that they could win.

They withdrew and left the machine to its death throes.

Where are the serpenthals?
O’Gan thought.
Have they left us so soon?

Across the battlefield, similar engagements were taking place. More machines had fallen, victims of the spartlets, and those still flying were doing so erratically. As O’Gan ran from the dying machine and the decapitated woman, he saw three more enemies tumble to the ground. They cut down Shantasi as they fell, and one machine exploded and cast a hail of deadly shrapnel before its blossom of fire. The Krotes who had survived the spartlets and the crashing of their machines took on Shantasi hand to hand, and several vicious fights were taking place. O’Gan went to join one of them.

Soon there was only one machine still circling, its rider hanging dead amongst its confusion of spidery legs, with spartlets pecking at his face. The machine seemed trapped in an ever-decreasing spiral, drifting lower and lower and casting globules of molten metal in a spray as it came down. A Shantasi screeched as he was caught in one spray, bringing his hands to a face that was no longer there. Another warrior dashed in and pulled him away, holding his hand tightly as he drew his knife across the mortally wounded man’s throat.

The machine eventually crashed to the ground and thrashed its limbs for a time, but the Shantasi were content to stay away and let it die.

Fires raged where machines had come apart. Another exploded, a thumping detonation that knocked O’Gan from his feet even though he was several hundred steps away. A cloud of boiling gas was blasted out, searing and scorching everything and everyone in its path. Shantasi lay scattered around the destroyed machine, many dead, many more injured, and O’Gan turned away because he knew that he could not help.

Fifteen machines and their riders,
he thought,
and how many have we lost? Two hundred? Three?

After a while the sounds of combat ceased, and the moans of the dying began.

O’GAN HAD NOT
killed for thirty years. Now he stood with Krote blood on his sword. He wiped the blade on a dead Krote’s leathers, blood gathering and flowing and catching the moons, and in it he saw the reflected shadows of spartlets still flitting above their heads.

Medics and Mourners moved here and there, helping injured Shantasi where they could, slitting their throats and chanting them down where they could not. O’Gan tried to shut the chanting from his mind.

“To me!” he called, and the Shantasi turned to face him. He climbed atop a dead machine, more than aware of the symbolism of his act as he rested his sword’s point on the thing’s ruptured back. A stink rose from within, curiously sweet and unpleasant. He breathed deeply and wondered whether all dead magic stank like this.

“This was only an advance force,” he shouted. “The spartlets will spread and hopefully disrupt any more attacks from above, but the Krote ground army will be here soon. An hour, or a heartbeat, but they’ll be here.” He looked north, saw nothing moving in the deeper darkness beyond the burning machines. “We’ll form two lines of defense. The first there, behind the largest burning machine. Its fires will blind them until they’re on top of you. The second five hundred steps back. Use the dead as shields. The Krotes see a dead warrior, they won’t expect a living one to rise behind it. We have more to send against them, and I hope that the land will aid us, and the serpenthals will rise again.” He looked around at the faces before him, grim and pale, dirtied and splashed with blood. And he wondered whether they knew what he had already realized: this was suicide. They were gaining time, that was all, precious hours or heartbeats for the witch and the girl.

None of them even knew whether those two were still alive.

“I’ve led you here,” he said, his voice falling on the last word. Most of the warriors probably did not even hear him.

“At least we’re fighting!” someone shouted. A sword waved, then another. There were no cheers—they were too tired and frightened for that—but O’Gan looked out at his army, and everyone he could see in this poor light was looking back at him. Not down at the ground, or east, where temporary safety may lie: at him. He nodded and jumped down from the dead machine.

The Shantasi regrouped, arranging themselves in two defensive lines with little discussion. Whichever line they were in, they knew that they would be fighting Krotes again soon. Krotes on foot, or on machines, or maybe those flying monsters again, swooping down through the spartlets and launching arrows or fireballs or stranger weapons yet.

O’Gan went to the forward line, approaching the blazing machine that had exploded with such devastating force. He passed by dozens of Shantasi bodies without looking. He did not wish to see the burns. The warmth grew and it felt good; eased his tensed muscles, tempered his tiredness, and he shrugged so that his cloak sat easier on his shoulders. A hundred steps from the burning machine he paused, looked around and knelt down. To his left he could see warriors fading into the distance, thirty steps between them in any direction, the line ten warriors deep. Their faces were lit by the flaming construct. To his right, the same view. The Shantasi—warriors, and those untrained in battle—staggered their positions, some heading farther forward as though keen to be the first to engage the Mages’ army, others hanging back. They all faced the same direction. Their faces were sweaty and grubby, determined, and none of them had sheathed their swords. There was movement here and there where other weapons harvested from the Mol’Steria Desert were prepared, but mostly the Shantasi sat alone. Crossbows were primed, quivers fixed tightly, hair tied back so that it did not get in the way. They checked the equipment strapping across their chests and around their waists, and some took weapons from dead bodies, careful not to look at the corpses’ faces. None of them wished to see a dead brother, sister or friend.

They could pass us by, five miles away,
O’Gan thought.
They could avoid the fires.
But he did not believe that would happen. His best hope was that they would not be able to resist the flames of battle.

He rested his sword on his knee, turning it this way and that so that it picked up the fire and reflected moonlight.

“Mystic, can you help us?” a woman said. O’Gan glanced to his left at where she lay on the ground, propped on her elbows and staring at him. She had wide eyes, and the pale skin of her face was smeared with blood from a head wound. She was no warrior. She held a single sword, and there was a pile of throwing stars by her left hand.

“I can offer you hope,” he said.

She looked down at the dead grass, averting her gaze.

“I can tell you that what we do here is important.”

“Suicide is important?”

O’Gan nodded at the burning machine. “We did well against them.”

“No we didn’t,” the woman said, but there was no anger in her voice, and no embarrassment at talking to a Mystic like this. “I can see a hundred dead even from where I lie. When their real army gets here…”

O’Gan looked at the shadowy humps scattered around them. “I can’t pretend you’re wrong,” he said, “but I can tell you that there’s meaning to all of this. There’s hope, and we’ll fight for it every second it still exists.”

“If it’s that important, why did the Elders run? Why didn’t they stay and fight? I saw them in the streets. I saw one of them dead by his own hand, and you expect me to believe there’s hope?”

O’Gan nodded, holding the woman’s gaze. She was strong, he realized, perhaps stronger than he. But equally, she saw no valor in sacrifice for an empty cause. “It’s
not
an empty cause,” he said quietly.

She glanced away again. “You saw those words in my mind.”

“I read them on your face.”

“So can you help us, Mystic?”

He hefted his sword. “I have this.” He nodded up at the spartlets. “We have those, and more. And perhaps the serpenthals will deign to help again.”

“Perhaps.”

He fell silent, the woman smiled and they heard thunder from the north.

O’GAN’S PLAN HAD
been to hide behind the glare of the massive fire. It was a good plan, but it stole sight from the first Shantasi line. They heard the advancing army, but they could not see it. They felt the ground shaking beneath them, but as much as they squinted or shielded their eyes, they could not make out anything. The burning machine turned the dusk beyond the battlefield into midnight.

The noise grew quickly. A rumble in the distance to begin with, like the sound of a storm rolling into Hess across the waters of Sordon Sound. Lightning scratched the sky, arcing from one point on the ground to another. The rumble soon turned into a roar, and the ground thumped to its beat. It grew louder and louder, assaulting the Shantasi’s ears, vibrating through their chests, punching at them where they lay or knelt.