The Scarab Path (80 page)

‘Tirado!’
Totho ordered. ‘Send for the
Iteration!
’

The
Fly-kinden saluted, and darted off down the river. The archers were drawing and
loosing as fast as they could, sending their shafts towards every unprotected
piece of Scorpion skin they could see. Still Amnon held firm in the midst of
the Royal Guard’s overlapping shields as the Scorpions hurled themselves onto
the bloody points of the Khanaphir spears. Now Meyr was fighting from behind
the line, using his height and reach to swat any Scorpion that gained a
foothold on the barricade. At any moment it seemed that the Scorpions must lose
their fervour, that the attack would ebb away in a flurry of final arrows, but
still they pressed and pressed. The corpses were mounting up and they used them
as stepping stones up to the Khanaphir shields. A score of the Guard had fallen
and been replaced, and the numbers of waiting reinforcements were now getting
sparse. Totho saw old Kham, Amnon’s cousin, jerk backwards with a huge gash
splitting halfway into his chest, dragging the Scorpion sword from its
wielder’s clawed hands as he fell.

On board the
Iteration
they had kept the
engines turning over, waiting for the call. In truth Corcoran had hoped that it
would be noon before the ship’s intervention was needed, but Tirado dropped
down on him before the sun was clear of the horizon.

‘Already?’
the Solarnese demanded.

‘Oh,
yes,’ Tirado confirmed. ‘Absolutely yes.’ He was in the air a moment later,
zigzagging back towards the embattled bridge.

Corcoran
cursed, thinking,
It isn’t our city
, for the
thousandth time. He shouted the orders, though. They had learned a lot from the
Empire, those in the Iron Glove. If you wanted to do well, you did what you
were told.
Totho’s got a plan. Totho’s got a plan
.
He repeated it to himself over and over, ignoring the way it sounded hollower
each time.

They
cast off, and the
Fourth Iteration
’s engines rumbled
them towards the bridge. Its approach would not have gone unmarked by the
enemy, and even now they would be wheeling out the leadshotters, not to be
caught by surprise as they had been the last time.

‘Get the
smallshotters to the rail!’ Corcoran called. ‘Once we’re in range I want every
damn one to go off. Cut them a new road back to the Nem: grapeshot and
scrapshot all weapons.’

He took
out his glass and unfolded it to its full length, raking the western shore for
the enemy’s disposition. Sure enough, there was a roil of activity there, but
the mass of Scorpions pushing to take their place on the bridge was so dense
that the crew of the
Iteration
could slaughter them
blindfold.
They’ve stepped it up today
, Corcoran
realized. It was barely dawn, and yet the Scorpions were already throwing
everything into the fray.

He spied
the smoke from the first leadshotter before he heard the sound, clutching at
the rail in sudden fear. The shot went short and wide, though, so far off that
it was useless even for ranging.
That’s it lads, you go and
waste your powder
. His own people knew the limits of their weapons. They
had their steel lighters ready, carefully withholding their fire until their
weapons were well into range.

That
first shot from the shore triggered a scatter of copycats, each of them falling
short and astern as they failed to take the
Iteration
’s
cruising into account. It came to Corcoran that the Scorpions would have no
real experience of shooting at a moving target and that leadshotters, even at
their best, were not designed for it.

He
looked upriver, where there was one obvious impediment to making a strafing
pass against the Scorpions. He ran astern to his helmsman, a Chasme halfbreed
called Hakkon, mentally trying to size up the
Iteration
with the bridge’s arches.

‘Can we
get past the bridge, if we wanted to?’ he asked. There was another scatter of
leadshot, and he heard the whoosh of water as the misplaced barrage broke up
nothing but the river.

Hakkon
tugged at his chin. ‘Probably,’ was all he would say. ‘Let me get closer to
see.’ The bridge had plainly been built to stop large vessels passing upriver,
but for the Khanaphir a large ship had a mast and a sail. The
Iteration
made a sleek, low profile in the water.

‘Close
to range!’ one of his men called, just as another leadshot raised a great spire
of water astern, near enough to rock them.

‘Keep
moving!’ Corcoran shouted. ‘Just keep moving!’ He ran forward again. There was
a constant sporadic pounding from the Scorpion engines now, one or other of
them hurling metal every few minutes. A scatter of optimistic crossbowmen were
loosing at them, standing knee-deep in the shallows. One of the bolts got as
near as to rattle off the hull.

Corcoran
watched the Scorpion masses still pushing for the bridge. There was a light
rain of bodies dropping from where the fighting was, Scorpions hurled back by
the Khanaphir or pushed off by their own side.

‘Now!’

This
time he remembered to hold on, as every smallshotter detonated at once. The
fistfuls of stone and metal shot scythed into the nearest Scorpions, killing
dozens where they stood.

‘Don’t
slow down!’ Corcoran shouted. ‘Under the bridge! Under the bridge!’ The arches
looked smaller than he had gauged.
If I’m wrong about this,
we’ll look like fools … and then we’ll die
. A lucky shot from the
Scorpion artillery clipped across the deck, smashing the rail to both port and
starboard in a hail of splinters. The smallshotters were being reloaded with an
artificer’s care, upended to receive the shot and wadding, and then turned down
again for the little pot that was the firepowder charge. A few crossbow bolts
clattered from the hull, and one of Corcoran’s men swore as one dug into his
arm, shallow enough to sag straight out again.

The
swiftest of them managed a second messy shot, loosing back at the Scorpions,
and then the shadow of the bridge covered them, ancient stones closing in
around them and gliding by on both sides, close enough to touch.

‘Keep
reloading!’ Corcoran told them, his voice echoing back down the length of the
massive archway. ‘They’ll be there on the other side.’

But their leadshotters won’t
, he realized. Almost all the
Scorpion artillery had been brought to the south of the bridge, to catch the
Iteration
. Until the Scorpions moved their cumbersome
weapons back, the ship could sit still in the water and pulverize Scorpions.
Corcoran grinned at the simplicity of it.

The
boat’s sides scraped against stone, but the crew were fending off the bridge
with poles and Hakkon had a steady hand. Now they emerged into the dawning
daylight, levelling their smallshotters at a surprised Scorpion army.

Totho crouched behind the barricade again, sliding another magazine into
his snapbow.
Field-testing, they call this
. He would
need to give the weapon some decent care tonight, as it had seen more action
this last day than any other score of snapbows anywhere in the world.
Yes, tonight. Hold on to that thought
.

He had
heard the thunder of the
Iteration
’s rail-engines,
but the Scorpions were still not slackening off. Their crossbowmen were killing
archers from behind their fence of shields, while their warriors were still
locked man to man with Amnon’s Guard. When Totho had last looked at them, the
defenders of Khanaphes had been awash with blood, not one of them without some
wound, except Amnon himself, and yet not one giving ground.

He
levered himself up cautiously. With a snapbow, he could crouch low, as the
Khanaphir archers could not. He had already felt one crossbow bolt bound
painfully from his helm, leaving a dent that pressed against his head every
time he moved it.

‘Fliers!’
Tirado shouted. ‘Look to the sky! Fliers!’

Fliers? Scorpions don’t fly
. For a moment Totho was too
surprised to do the obvious thing and look up. Then he saw the Wasps coming in,
only a handful of them, but he caught sight of what their lead man was holding.

‘Shoot
them down!’ he called out, at the top of his voice. ‘Kill the Wasps! Kill the
airborne!’

He
loosed his own shot, but against a swift-flying target it flew hopelessly wide.
The other Khanaphir simply had not responded. Their world scarcely admitted an
‘airborne’ aspect to war. They were busy killing Scorpions on the ground.

Totho
shot a second bolt, missed again, and then threw himself off the barricade,
dragging the nearest archer with him.

The
first Wasp grenade was off target, shattering on the bridge’s edge in a sudden
flash of fire that startled many but harmed nobody. The second dropped neatly
into the massed archers close to where Totho had just been.

It was a
simple clay pot with a cloth fuse, but someone had patiently packed it with
nails and stones and a solid charge of firepowder stolen from the leadshotters.
The simplicity of the device was an affront to artifice: clumsy, inaccurate and
unreliable.

On this occasion,
simplicity won out. Totho saw the explosion erupt amid the archers, shredding
men and women to pieces so that their flesh rained down on friend and foe
alike, hurling others off their feet to tumble down on the stones or plummet
into the water. A section of the wooden battlement the size of two men was
blown off into the Scorpion crossbows, leaving a broad space of the archers’
platform unprotected. Totho covered his eye-slit as a rain of splinters and
metal and pieces of bone rattled against his armour.

Another
grenade went past, exploding on the bridge behind him as the thrower
miscalculated his own momentum. A firepot of oil landed amongst the archers on
the other side, in a shocking gout of flame. Totho raised his snapbow,
remembering the brutal chaos of the siege of Tark, where Wasp airborne had been
thick in the sky. He caught one of the men turning, missed twice and hit with
his last shot, the bolt tearing through the man’s thigh. The Wasp spun out of
the air and dropped down past the bridge’s side.

Then he
heard the
Iteration
’s smallshotters again, but this
time to the north of the bridge. A shudder rippled through the Scorpion ranks,
and the crack and boom of the ship’s weapons sounded again and again, shot
overlapping shot in their eagerness. Despite the damage done by the grenades,
the Scorpion tide began to ebb. The archers that remained were not letting up,
loosing arrow after arrow even as parts of their barricade burned.

At last,
their rear ranks continually raked by the
Iteration
’s
insistent fusillade, the Scorpions drew back.

They had a pack of carpenters on the barricades trying to repair the
damage that the grenades had done, hammering new wood into place frantically,
as the Scorpion horde reordered itself for its second charge.

‘We can’t
last another one of those assaults,’ Amnon said, finally down from the breach
after hours of holding the line. He had his helm off and his face was streaked
with sweat, darkly bruised about one eye where an axe had glanced from his
helmet.

‘Meyr,
how many Wasps did you see amongst the Scorpions, back in the Nem?’ Totho
asked.

The Mole
Cricket hunched close. ‘Two dozen, three, somewhere around that number.’

‘We were
lucky,’ Totho decided. Amnon just raised an eyebrow, thinking no doubt of all
the archers who had burned or been blown apart by just a few hurled missiles.
Totho shook his head. ‘Believe me, we could have lost it all, right then,
except the men who came over were Slave Corps. The Empire’s Engineering Corps
has trained grenadier squads and they’d have made more of a mess than we could
hope to clean up. The Scorpion commander’s making use of what they’ve got, but
it’s makeshift. Most of what they threw at us went wide, even into the river.’

‘They’ll
come again,’ Amnon said. ‘It won’t take many of them.’

‘Leave
them to the archers,’ Totho told him. ‘They’re ready now, and I get the
impression they take it personally.’ The archers had not lost many to the
Scorpion main force, only receiving a few casualties from crossbow bolts. It
had taken the grenades to seriously bloody them, and Totho knew that when the
Wasps came back, they would fly into a sky filled with arrows.

Amnon
sighed. He looked impossibly tired. ‘It was only your ship’s weapons that drew
them off.’

‘True.
And yes, we can’t rely on that. The
Iteration
won’t
manage such a good round of broadsides again. They’ll distribute their
’shotters either side of the bridge, force her to keep moving.’

‘The
next charge, do you think?’ Amnon’s eyes held his gaze.

I should say something reassuring at this point, but I cannot lie
to him
. ‘The next charge,’ Totho agreed. ‘It seems likely. After that we
abandon the defence to Praeda Rakespear’s theory, and I hope it’s sound.’ He
looked back to the east shore where construction still went on.

Dariset approached
them. ‘There’s a stir amongst the Scorpions,’ she said. ‘They’re getting ready,
we think.’

Amnon
nodded to her and pulled his helm back on, his fingers lacing the buckle
without the need for thought.
If only Drephos could see how
we field-test this armour
, Totho thought bleakly.
I
should put a report in a bottle and drop it off the bridge: Armour performance
sufficiently above tolerance to outlast that of the flesh
.

‘They’re
moving!’ Tirado cried out. ‘Shield-carapace to the front again.’ The Fly was
crouching atop the wooden battlements, resting there until he absolutely had to
take flight again. Totho hopped up to join the archers, but the curve of the
bridge hid the initial Scorpion movements. Everyone knew the distances by now.
The archers were nocking arrows; they would loose them before the first enemy
appeared over the crest of the arch. The Scorpions themselves would take their
time in their early advance, and would start breaking into a charge as the
first arrows landed on them. The carpenters, their work less than half done,
dropped down to the bridge again and fled back to the east bank.