Dragonfly Falling (50 page)

‘A secret weapon?’
someone suggested.

‘All speculation,’
Thadspar insisted. ‘Why should Sarn not aid us?’

‘We have no idea of the
situation,’ Stenwold insisted. ‘It is simply this. The Vekken are here. They do
not relish defeat, and so they must believe they can win.’

‘Perhaps they seek to
capture the walls before Sarn can even get its army here,’ Waybright said. ‘If
they already had the city, Sarn might turn back.’

‘All I am saying is that
we cannot fight this war on the assumption that the Sarnesh will rescue us
sooner or later,’ Stenwold said. ‘If we fight, we must fight to drive them away
with whatever strength we have ourselves.’

They did not like that.
He could see that none of them wanted to accept it. A holding action, they
thought, just until . . . Kymon met his eyes and nodded.

A messenger burst in, a
young Beetle girl quite out of breath. ‘Their artillery is shooting at us!’ she
said. ‘What do we do now?’

Kymon stood. ‘All
officers to your posts!’ he snapped. ‘Stenwold?’

‘Here.’

‘If the harbour falls,
the city falls, and they’ll attack it, tomorrow or the next day at the latest.
Everybody listen: if you have someone coming to you with means to defend the
harbour, send them to Stenwold. Everything will count.’

The Vekken were very
efficient in their mustering. When Thalric and Daklan had put the Empire’s
invitation to them an army had been raised in mere days. The Vekken, like all
Ants, were soldier-born. The soundless call had gone out into the city, and
without a spoken word it had been answered by the thousands of the war host of
Vek. There had then been the matter of material, machines, supplies. It was a
matter long settled, though, for Vek had been looking for this war for decades,
awaiting the moment when Sarn’s protective hand was lifted from the reviled
city of scholars. The supplies were already laid in, the machines in readiness,
the crossbow bolts and engine ammunition neatly stockpiled. Each year the
tacticians of Vek had convened and added what further elements they could to
the plan, while their artificers continued their patient progress.

So, when they had
arrived and surrounded the city, it had been a wonder of discipline. There was
not a man but who knew to the inch where his place was. The engineers had begun
instantly bringing forward their machines: lead-shotters, catapults and
scorpions, trebuchets and ballistae, a great host of destruction of every kind
that the artificers of Vek could conceive of. The smaller machines were
unloaded from carts, or had progressed under their own mechanical power. The
larger were constructed on the spot even as the artificers made their
calculations, their crews untiring and careful to a fault. To the watchers on
the walls of Collegium it seemed that the Vekken battle plan unfolded as
smoothly as a parchment, spreading out and around their beloved city.

Akalia did not watch her
men prepare. She had no need. They were already in her head, each section and
squad informing her of its readiness. They gave her a perfect map of the field
in her mind’s eye, the composite of all that each soldier saw. Sitting in her
tent she was also everywhere her forces were.

There
is no time like now
, she instructed her people, and called for her
tacticians. They responded almost as one, alert for the order. At the same time
her engineers were tensioning and charging their siege weapons, all of them,
all at once.

Test
your ranges
, she told them mentally, and one from each battery loosed,
sending rocks or shot spinning high towards the pale walls of Collegium.
Attend me
, she told her officers, and stepped out into the
afternoon light to see the first plumes of stone dust that her ranging shots
had raised from the walls, or the dust from the earth where they had fallen
short.

Correct
your ranges
, she instructed, feeling the artificers all around making
their measurements, their practical mathematics of elevation and angle.

Loose
one round
, she decided and, even as she sent the order out she felt the
ground quiver beneath her feet as all her engines rocked back simultaneously
with the force of their discharge. A fair proportion of the machines still
lacked the range, but this time more missiles found the walls than failed. The
city of Collegium was briefly swathed in puffs of stone dust, as though it were
letting off fireworks.

What
damage?
she asked. Forward of their artillery positions were officers
equipped with telescopes, raking the walls for any weaknesses, and their
reports were rapidly passed back:
None, sir. No damage
sighted, sir. Some slight scarring, sir.

She had expected nothing
less, because Beetles, for all their inferior characteristics, knew how to lay
stone on stone. The tacticians of Vek had counted on that when they designed
this expedition. They were still assembling much of the artillery: great
trebuchets, leadshotters and rock-throwers to attack the walls; grapeshot
ballistae to rake the battlements clean of soldiers at closer range;
engine-powered rams and lifting towers for the troops to take the walls. There
were even experimental grenade-throwers, delicate, spindly things designed to
throw small, volatile missiles deep into the city beyond.

The fleet had blockaded
the rivermouth and was now waiting for her signal to make its assault, but the
walls would come first. She was a traditional soldier, and she preferred
traditional methods to the unknown concerns of a sea landing.

Let
it all come down
, she sent out the order.
Pound the
walls until sunset. Let the dawn tell us the result.

‘Soldiers off the
walls!’ Kymon bellowed, though he was ignoring his own advice by striding along
the east wall as the missiles came in. Many landed short, throwing up plumes of
earth from the fields or impacting amongst the straggle of buildings out there:
Wayhouses, storehouses, farmers’ huts, all abandoned now. Some struck the wall
itself, and he felt the impact shudder through his sandals. A few even flew
over to smash stonework in the city below. He stopped and backed up a few
steps, waiting, and a lead ball clipped the very battlements ten feet ahead. He
had found a disaffected Kessen youth amongst the volunteers and put him to good
use. Now Kymon could walk blithely amongst his troops and inspire them with his
disregard for the enemy, whilst all the time the boy was watching the incoming
assault and giving him warning.

The walls of Collegium
had their own artillery, but the Vekken army had brought up a whole host of it,
more than even he had thought they possessed. The defenders’ engines were
outnumbered four to one along the west wall, where the brunt of the attack was
concentrated. Soon, he well knew, the barrage would begin to creep towards the
wall-mounted weapons so as to clear the way for the Vekken infantry.

But where Vek had
strength, Collegium had intelligence. Here before him was a team of artificers
working at one such weapon. As he watched the great catapult began to revolve,
descending foot by foot into the stonework of its tower with a groaning of
gears and a hiss of steam. Further along the wall they were winching great iron
shields into position about a repeating ballista.

Kymon dropped to one
knee and peered over the city side of the wall. There was a detachment of some
three hundred city militia below and he shouted at them, ‘Clear the way!’ He
gestured furiously. ‘Left and right from me! Clear the way!’

Most of them got the
idea and just ran for it, dodging to either side. A moment later a great rock
whistled over Kymon’s head to spin past them and smash into the wall of the
building beyond, pelting them all with a shrapnel of fist-sized stones. He saw
a few fall to it, but most were clear. It was far more frustrating than he had
thought, to command soldiers he could not commune with mind to mind.

And they were such a
rabble too. They brought determination and enthusiasm, but little discipline.
Some were the city militia, decently enough armoured but more used to quelling
taverna brawls and catching thieves than to fighting wars. The bulk of
Collegium’s armed force was simply those citizens bold enough to put themselves
forward for it. Some brought their own weapons, others had been armed from the
College stores. Anyone with any training as an artificer had been given
something from the workshops: repeaters, piercers, nailbows and wasters, or
whatever ’prentice pieces were lying around. Some attempt had been made to sort
them into squads similarly armed, but the mess of men and women beneath Kymon
bristled with a ragged assortment of spears, swords, crossbows, clubs and
agricultural implements.

He stood again, waiting
for despair to wash over him, but instead found a strange kind of pride. If
these defenders had been Ant-kinden of his own city it would have been
shameful, but they were not. They were Beetles, mostly, but there were others,
too: Flies, rogue Ants, Spiders, halfbreeds, even some Mantids and Moths. They
were truly the host of Collegium, the city which had opened its gates to the
world.

He came to the catapult
emplacement to find the weapon more than half hidden now, steadily grinding
itself down below the level of the wall. There was a man, a College artificer,
crouching by the battlements with a telescope and some kind of sextant, making
quick calculations.

‘Is this going to work?’
Kymon had forgotten the man’s name, but when the goggled face turned up to him
he recalled him as Master Graden, who taught applied fluid mechanics.

‘I am assured it will.
Not my department, obviously, but the mathematics are simple enough,’ Graden
explained. ‘Incidentally, Master Kymon, my invention – have you had a chance to
consider it? The sand is to hand, and my apprentices have it ready to place on
the walls.’

It seemed that almost
every artificer in Collegium believed that they had an invention that could
help the war effort. Kymon was no artificer, but the mention of sand jogged his
memory further.

‘Have it ready,’ he
said, more as a sop to the man’s pride than anything. ‘Every little thing may
help.’

He passed on towards the
next emplacement. Behind him another lead shot struck the wall, making it
shiver beneath his feet like a living thing.

‘It doesn’t look like
they’re coming,’ one of his soldiers said to him. Stenwold shook his head.

‘They’re coming, but not
just yet. I need the chain ready in time. It must be our first line of
defence.’

‘But the mechanism
hasn’t been used in—’ The soldier waved a hand vaguely. ‘I don’t know if it’s
ever been used, Master Stenwold.’

‘Oil it, fix it –
replace the cursed thing if you have to. Don’t be the man whose failures make
the city fall.’

It was unfair, but the
man fell back, face twisting in shame, and ran off to do his job. Stenwold
turned briefly to the men who had answered his call, but his attention was
drawn back to the sea. This had been the harbourmaster’s office, and the view
from it would have been beautiful if not marred by the ugly blots of the Vekken
fleet. The armourclads, iron-plated or iron-hulled ships with monstrously
powerful engines, formed the vanguard, waiting out in anchored formation with
smoke idling from their funnels.

‘How are we going to
stop them?’ Stenwold asked, for Collegium had no navy. The few ships in harbour
were only those which had not seized the chance to flee before the harbour was
blockaded, and they were definitely not fighting ships.

‘The harbour has its
artillery defences, as well as the chain, Master,’ reminded Cabre, a Fly who
was an artificer from the College. ‘They were designed with wooden ships in
mind, though, and they’ve not been updated in thirty years. You know how it is.
When Vek came last it was overland, and nobody thought . . .’

‘And we’ll now pay for
that lack of imagination,’ Stenwold grumbled.

‘We don’t know if they
could even dent the armourclads out there,’ Cabre admitted, scratching the back
of her head.

‘What else have we got?’
Stenwold asked.

‘Master Maker?’ It was a
Beetle-kinden man who must be at least ten years Stenwold’s junior. For a
Beetle he looked lean and combative.

‘Yes, Master . . . ?’

‘Greatly, Master Maker.
Joyless Greatly. I have a cadre of men, Master Maker. Some twenty in all. I
have recently been working on an invention for the Sarnesh, but I cannot think
that they would object to our using it in our own defence.’

And
he does not add, ‘until they get here’
, Stenwold noted. Joyless seemed
to him a name of ill omen. It tended to denote children named by their fathers
after their mothers had not survived the infant’s birth. ‘Go on, Master
Greatly.’

Joyless Greatly stared
challengingly about the room, at a dozen or so artificers who had been sent to
Stenwold’s care. ‘I have developed a one-man orthopter, Master Maker. I have one
score and ten of these ready to fly, though only my twenty men are trained to
fly them.’

It seemed impossible.
‘Thirty orthopters? But where . . . ?’ Stenwold asked him.

‘They are not what you
think, Master Maker. These are worn on the back, as you will see. When the
fleet approaches, or when the army comes to our walls, I will take my men out.
We will drop grenades and incendiaries on them. Their ships may be hulled with
iron, but they will not have armoured decks. We can drop explosives into their
funnels, or on their weapons.’

‘They will shoot you
down,’ Cabre warned him, but there was a fire in Greatly’s expression, of
either patriotism or madness.

‘Let them try, for I
will outrace their bolts and quarrels. Master Maker, we may be your second line
of defence, but we
shall
attack.’