The Scarab Path (68 page)

Time
. Totho had no idea how long they could hold, but the
first few waves of attack would provide useful data.
How
long until the Scorpion host breaks up, hungry and frustrated? How long before
masses of them start raiding further upriver?

There are so many of them
. He was beginning to see the
enemy as the locals did. Compared with the size of the Imperial armies he had travelled
with, both sides here were betting with pocket change only. Here and now,
though, there really were a lot of Scorpions ranged on the other side of the
river.

If they just come at us, if they just charge and charge and
charge, climbing over their own dead like mad things, we’ll be swept off here
within hours
.

He
shifted his shoulders, letting the plates of his pauldrons settle. This new
armour had seen no battles yet. This one would be its first. The hush falling
on the Khanaphir, as the three of them had arrived, had been shocking. Totho,
big Amnon, giant Meyr: three war-automata, things of faceless black metal,
lords of war.
We are making legends here
, he
thought, and then:
but only if we win
.

He had
hoped Che would be here. She wasn’t, and there was no help for that, but he had
hoped she might hear of what he was doing, and come to see him off.

He saw
the Mantis woman, Teuthete, leap up on to the barricades, with her recurved bow
in one hand. There was a scattering of her people here, all archers.
It really has been a long time since I fought alongside the
Mantis-kinden
. That felt like another world, another epoch, a story of
once upon a time.

Amnon
vaulted up to take the centre, of course, his shield on his arm and his spear
drawn back. To either side of him were the pick of his Royal Guard, men and
women in scaled hauberks, with their elliptical shields and long spears. They
were braced, and Totho could hear the thunder of the Scorpions, the roar of
their battle cries, as they rushed up the facing slope of the bridge.

Rush on
, he thought,
and welcome to
the modern age
.

He did
not even have to look. The first screams each denoted a caltrop for him, and he
imagined the charge stumbling over itself, warriors trying desperately to stop,
feet run through with agony, while being shoved from behind by their heedless
fellows. The archers were busy, methodical and unchallenged, as they emptied
their quivers into the enemy. There were always more arrows.

Totho
clambered up, not too proud to take the offer of a helping hand. The Scorpions
were already in retreat, leaving a great bank of their dead that was still
yards short – spike-studded yards short – of the barricade. The archers
continued to let fly, sending their arrows over the arch of the bridge on to the
fleeing host, heedless of individual targets.

The
second and third Scorpion advances were desultory. They came without
enthusiasm, barely got within the sight of the archers before they were falling
back in a scattered and dispirited rabble. The Khanaphir cheered as their
opponents disappeared back beyond the curve of the bridge.

‘We
can’t have broken them,’ Amnon stated, stepping down from the breach. He had
not yet bloodied his spear. ‘They are stronger than that.’

‘They’re
preparing something,’ Totho said. He leant back against the stones, feeling
their reassuring solidity against his backplate. ‘They’ve got a plan. This is
just to keep them busy while they work it up.’ He glanced at Amnon, but the
man’s open, honest face was now a metal carapace, just a dark slot for the
eyes.

We look evil in these helms
. It was a child’s gleeful
thought. He imagined the Scorpions seeing Amnon the deathbringer, the
black-armoured warlord at the centre of the line. It must give them pause, he
thought. It must shake them. The sight was worth a fistful of caltrops, at the
very least.

There
was a call from the barricades and Amnon stepped back up. A moment later he
shouted, ‘This is it!’

Totho
scrabbled at the stones hurriedly, using his Art to clamber up to the archery
platform. What he saw from there wrenched his stomach.

Oh Che
, he thought, with a fervent hope that she never
learned about this small stratagem.

The
Scorpions again crested the bridge’s arc, and this time they had brought
company. Ahead of their line, herded forward by spears and halberd-points, were
perhaps two score Khanaphir, prisoners who had so far escaped torture or
butchery. Some were children. Totho glanced at the archers around him, with
their strings drawn back, and saw faces abruptly torn with shock.

Shoot them
, Totho thought.
Shoot them
and save the caltrops for the enemy
. He opened his mouth, looking to see
if Amnon would give the command.
Shoot them! Do not even
think to break ranks and let them through
. The lines of spears, Amnon
and his Royal Guard, all held fast but no orders came.

Bowstrings
twanged. It was the Mantis-kinden, drawing and loosing with casual speed,
between the prisoners and over them. Totho did not know whether they were
confident of their aim or heedless of the consequences. Still, the Scorpions
were slowed by their own trick. Each arrow brought a death, winging from over
the wooden parapet to plunge through Scorpion mail, through flesh. There were
only a dozen Mantids at the wall, though, and the Khanaphir archers still held
back, arms trembling and teeth bared.

‘Loose!’
bellowed Amnon, and Totho wondered whether he had simply not seen the problem,
with his vision limited to that unfamiliar slot. Even with his orders, most of
the archers did not shoot. Those that did pitched their arrows high, trying to
curve down on the Scorpion rear ranks. The advance was now at the bank of
bodies that the first wave of attack had left behind.

A great
roar went up from the Many of Nem, not just the warriors on the bridge but the
whole host on the west bank, and they pushed forward. The rearmost of the
prisoners went down at once, lanced through by spears, hacked by axes. The rest
fled.

Totho
braced himself for it, but it was brutal. As tactics went, it had a clever
simplicity that Drephos would have approved of. The prisoners fled towards
their fellow citizens, heedless of the spears, but it was not the spears that
took them. They plunged on to that unplumbed no-man’s-land, and screamed and
fell and clambered over each other, and fell again, lanced through by the
caltrops. Totho felt the defenders shudder, saw the spearpoints ripple as the
soldiers fought against their own instincts. They were an inch away from
breaking forward to recover the fallen.

‘Hold!’
he shouted, and who cared that he was in no position to give orders. ‘Hold and
ready!’ he commanded, just like a real battlefield officer, like a Wasp captain
who had only his voice to keep his unruly soldiers in line.

Oh, if only artifice could give us the Ants’ mindlink
.

But they
held. It was their discipline or Amnon’s steady presence, or even Totho’s
exhortation, but they held. There were tears in some eyes, and hands shook. The
Scorpions were coming.

They
enacted a savage mercy upon the fallen as they came, stamping and hacking at
them, working themselves into a greater frenzy. Arrows, long restrained,
punched into them, but they were at the barricades now, and the dead Khanaphir
were a few extra inches of height to assault the spears.

Still,
it was fully four feet of stone and a wooden lip, and a fence of spears beyond.
The Scorpion assault broke against those defences. Lean, tall men and women,
like fanged and clawed monsters, were run through a dozen times as they leapt
up like madmen. They fell back, pulling the spears along with them, as they
died faster than new lances could be passed from the back. Halberd blades
cracked shields, even split the wood of the barricades. The shock of that first
impact whiplashed back through the Scorpion lines, but it did not stop them.
This time they kept coming.

Totho
fitted a magazine to his snapbow, the model he had made with his own hands, and
set to work. As the archers either side of him fitted their arrows, drew back
and let fly, he directed the weapon into the enemy and depressed the trigger,
feeling the minute kick, the explosive snap-snap-snap-snap-snap as it
discharged. Five bolts, and he had remembered to swing his arm to rake this
volley across the host. Otherwise he would have put them all virtually in the
same target, killing one wretched Scorpion so unnecessarily dead that
anatomists would have refused the body as a teaching specimen.

Totho
ducked back behind the parapet and charged the battery, not lever-pumped as
with the originals, but wheel-pumped for smoothness and speed. His gauntleted
hands spun the little winch-handle with the ease of long familiarity, and then
he was ready to empty the other half of the magazine into them.

No bloodlust required
, he thought.
No
howling hordes, no particular strength, not even any real skill, at this close
range. I have made war a province of the intellectual
.
Snap-snap-snap-snap-snap, the finger-sized bolts punching through armoured men,
sometimes two or even three at a time, unstoppable. They had no idea what was
killing them, and most of them were dead on impact, a narrow hole drilled
through chest or skull becoming a fist-sized gob of gore by the time it made
its exit. He took another magazine and clicked it into place with his thumb,
forcing the old one out into his waiting hand.

I did well, when I made these
.

Something
struck him in the chest, and he was abruptly airborne, flying for a moment
before he struck the side of the bridge hard enough to hammer the breath from
him. The armour saved him from broken bones, but for a moment he just lay
there, unable to understand what had happened. He levered his helmet back,
craning to look down. There was a dent and a long scar across his mail, and his
professional understanding supplied:
crossbow bolt
.

He
looked up just as one of Amnon’s people was punched backwards, the short end of
another bolt lodged in his throat. Shields were being raised along the line,
and he saw how the archers had pitched their aim higher, shooting further.
Totho levered himself to his feet, feeling the pain of a body-length bruise. Despite
it, he levered himself onto the barricade again, to get a look over the
parapet.

There
was a line of crossbowmen up on the very apex of the bridge, not shooting all
together but each man intent on dragging the string back and loosing as swiftly
as he could. Before them stood a rank of Scorpion-kinden with shields, trying
to keep them under cover from the Khanaphir archers. The shields were all of
city make, Totho noticed, so the Scorpions had not been idle in their
pillaging.

Shields, is it?
There were plenty of arrow spines
bristling on those captured shields, for the Khanaphir shortbows did not have
the strength to penetrate them. Totho grinned to himself, within the privacy of
his helm, and charged his snapbow again.

Teuthete
loosed a shaft that split one of the enemy shields, lancing on through to kill
its bearer outright. The Mantis recurves had a prodigious power to them, but
Totho carried something better.

He
sighted up on the Scorpion line, using the notches and the little annotated
scale he had meticulously cut into the weapon’s sight, thus adjusting for his
best guess at distance and elevation. It was like employing a little siege
engine.

He
loosed, more careful this time, pausing after each shot to find his next
target. When he was done, there was a gap five shields wide in the Scorpion
defence. He dropped back to recharge his weapon.
Let the
archers get busy now
.

‘Totho!’
Amnon bellowed, and he was on his feet in an instant.

‘What is
it?’ Totho’s eyes scanned the surging Scorpion host, trying to spot what the
other man had seen. He wasted precious time trying to fit a view of the entire
battle into the slot of his helm, before he dragged it off to see. ‘Oh …’ And
what? For a second he was frozen, not a military man at all but an artificer feeling
abruptly out of place. Then: ‘Shoot them down! The bearers! Shoot them!’ It was
too close, though. Too close already. The Scorpion lines were falling back
raggedly, many of their men staying on alone to hack at the defenders.
They must not realize what it is
. Totho knew what it was,
though. A petard. An explosive. A wall-breaker.

Too
close. He ran along the width of the barricade and hooked one hand under
Amnon’s pauldron, before hurling himself back, shouting, ‘Get off the wall!’

For a
moment he thought Amnon would simply not budge and he would be left hanging
from the man’s armour like a trophy. Then his own weight told, and Amnon was
falling back as, for the second time, Totho dropped from the barricade.

If Amnon falls on top of me he’ll kill me
. It was an odd
candidate for potential last thoughts.

He
struck the stone of the bridge and skidded, actually seeing a few sparks from
the ridges of his breastplate, then he heard an almighty clatter as Amnon fell
by his feet.

Totho
braced himself as best he could.

There
was a pause in which he wondered,
Has it failed to go off?

It went
off.

The
force of the blast shook every stone of the bridge, even though it had been
such a small petard. The shock lifted Totho up and put him down half a foot
further back.

He got
to his feet, head ringing with the sound of it, turning to see what extent of
ruin had been wreaked on them.