City in the Sky (20 page)

“If one of the cart-trains turns up, we will all be turned into wheel-grease,” the Red continued cheerfully, “but the main mines are on their lunch break – there will not be any trains for a few hours yet.”

At least partially mollified by the Red's response, Brane followed the Dwarves through the tunnel with its iron rails into the outdoors. They stood high up in the industrial terraces on the north side of the North Hold valley.

“Now, where are they supposed to be?” the Red demanded.

“They're headed to the Derian Powder Mill,” Brane replied. Along with the
Cloudrunner
's itinerary he'd managed to learn who the ship's customers were.

“They will be coming up that road then,” the Red said with a grunt, gesturing at one of the paths cutting its way up the terraces. “Move.”

The Dwarves moved surprisingly swiftly and with little notice through the factories and smelters on the terraces, ignoring the smog in the air. Finally, as they came down a terrace, they spotted a solid block of people moving up the side of the mountain.

“That them?” the Red asked.

Wordlessly, Brane removed a small telescope from his belt and looked through it. The group was definitely Aeradi, moving in good order with shields and armor. His lips turned upwards in a slight smile at the sign of their ready paranoia.

He focused the telescope on each face in turn, and found the one he was looking for about halfway back through the ranks.

“Yes,” he said shortly. “Tarverro is there.”

“Good,” the Red replied. He turned back to his men and eyed them. His gaze fell upon one of them, the quieter of the two who'd accompanied Erik to their base. “Bors, you keep ten of the boys here, just in case.”

Brane blinked. If ten of the dwarves remained behind, that left only a few more than thirty to attack the Aeradi.

“How do you plan to pull this off?” he asked, not quite questioning the Dwarf's decision.

The Red grinned at him and reached inside his leathers, pulling out a pair of small iron cylinders. He hooked one to his axe's thong, and bounced the other in his hand.

“Tell me, Draconan,” he said with a grin, “have you ever heard of grenades?”

The powder mill was still a good two blocks away when an explosion on the street tore through the relative peace of North Hold's northern industrial district, bare yards away from the Aeradi marines.

Several of the Aeradi went down, and then Erik spotted a small iron canister arc over a fence into the middle of the formation. He didn't have time to even shout a warning before the second grenade detonated.

The explosion hammered the entire platoon into the ground, leaving half a dozen men badly wounded, and most of the rest scratched and dazed. Erik, who'd merely been knocked off his feet by the blast, had barely stood up when he heard pounding feet and looked up.

Thirty or so Dwarves, scruffy and unkempt except for the apparently
very
well maintained swords and axes in their hands, came around the corner and charged the Aeradi platoon.

“Up!” Erik shouted. “It's an ambush! Up!”

The blast had shattered the marines' cohesion, and there were barely ten men on their feet with Erik. With a curse, Erik raised his shield and drew his sword, gesturing the other men into line with him, protecting their wounded.

The Dwarven attackers hit the improvised shield wall hard. Axes slammed into Erik's shield, and he grunted as the impacts traveled up his arm. For a moment, all the marines could do was hold the shield wall.

Then one of the Dwarves got an axe over the shield of the marine next to Erik and the man went down, bleeding profusely from a horrific wound to his shoulder. Erik turned, warding off the men in front of him with his shield and lashed out with his tachi.

None of the Dwarves were carrying shields or wearing armor, and his target had been leaping forward to take advantage of the gap created by the fallen marine. The long sky steel blade punched in through the Dwarf's side, and then ripped out, spilling both the man and his guts onto the cobbled streets.

Erik's turn, however, had destabilized the already weak shield line, and it broke apart into a melee with two or three attackers focusing on each marine. As Erik realized this, he spun away from the man he'd just killed, only to find three Dwarves closing in on him.

One of them came in close, a Draconan-style short sword flickering out in front of him. The other two, armed with long-handled axes, stayed slightly further back, but spread out, leaving Erik to face multiple angles of attack.

He desperately parried the swordsman, blocking one axe with his shield and ducking under the other. They forced him back a step, then another. Erik's shield covered one half of his body, and his tachi wove a complex pattern in the air as it parried each attack.

Finally, he blocked a sword strike with his shield, and then parried the shaft of the right hand axe. The axe-head dropped to the stones with a clanging noise, and Erik smoothly carried through to drive the tip of his blade into the Dwarf's throat.

One of his three attackers dropped to the ground, but the swordsman drove in as Erik killed the first Dwarf, his blade skittering over Erik's shield. It hit his armored shoulder, and just barely slid off the chainmail links. Unbalanced, the swordsman stumbled forwards, and Erik slammed the metal edge of his shield into the man's throat.

With a horrible crunching noise, the second of his attackers fell, and Erik spun lightly on his feet to face the last axeman. The Dwarf looked nervous for a moment, until two of his friends appeared through the chaos to join him.

Erik took advantage of the pause as his attackers sorted themselves out to glance around. More of the platoon had recovered from the grenade blasts, but most of the marines who'd originally been up were now down, and another ten or so Dwarves had arrived, adding to the attackers’ numbers.

Even with the losses the first marines had inflicted, the ones still on their feet were easily outnumbered three to one. Erik snarled at his attackers. They might manage to take him and his men, but they were going to bleed for the privilege.

The three Dwarves, all armed with axes, met his snarl with answering snarls of their own, and charged. Erik stepped into their charge, hammering two of the axe strikes aside with his shield, and stopping the last attack by parrying the attacker. With a reach none of the Dwarves could match, he slammed the tachi into the smaller man's side with a strength few Aeradi could claim.

The Dwarf crumpled to the side, his torso ripped open by the blow, and Erik turned to the survivors. So far, he'd laid out four of the thugs for not even a scratch of his own, and they were starting to get nervous.

As he turned back to his attackers, however, he spotted something else. At the end of the street, behind the attacker’s backs, a squad of Dwarven soldiers had just rounded the corner, presumably having been drawn by the sound of the explosions. There may only have been twelve of them, but they were armored and their cohesion unbroken.

Emboldened by the sight, Erik drove forward against his attackers. Neither of their strikes got past his interposed shield, and his strike slid under the curved lower edge of his sword to rip the closer Dwarf's leg open, collapsing him to the ground.

Then the thugs finally realized that the soldiers were there, due to the distinctive – and loud – sound of twelve men in heavy chainmail double-timing it down a cobbled street. They broke and ran, leaving their dead and their wounded on the streets.

Stunned by explosions and the sudden attack, the Aeradi let them go. Erik stood among the marines, watching them run, but lacking the energy to do anything about it. His gaze followed them down the street, and paused as he saw another man vanishing around a corner, as if he'd been watching the battle.

The man had looked completely out of place in North Hold's industrial area. He'd looked, in fact, like someone Erik
knew
to be long dead, but that was likely just distance. What Erik was sure of, however, was that he'd just seen a Draconan, and that Draconan had been watching men try to kill him.

The initial strike of the grenades had filled Brane with exultation, but the Aeradi had reacted quickly and well –too quickly, and too well. Even as Bors and his reinforcements went charging forwards to try and turn the tide, Brane was beginning to fade off to the side.

When the soldiers came charging around the corner, presumably drawn by the sound of explosions, Brane pressed himself against the wall, suppressing pointless curses. Clearly, the attack had become a failure.

Even as he began to look for a way to get away, the Blood Axes broke and fled. Brane had no choice now, and quickly stepped out, moving through the running Dwarves like he belonged on the street.

He quickly glanced backwards as he reached the corner, and nearly froze as his eyes met the gaze of the man he'd come here to kill. For a silent moment Brane found himself staring at his brother's killer before, with a muttered curse, he stepped around the corner.

Brane barely had time to start to breathe a sigh of relief before something hard and metal socketed itself to his chest. For a long moment, the Red Dragon captain simply stood there in silence, and then he looked down at the Dwarf whose arquebus was drilled against his chest.

“So like a Draconan,” Bors said in his hoarse voice. “So like your sniveling kind to run away when it goes balls-up.” The click of the Dwarf priming the cocking lever was somehow deafeningly loud, even over the noise of the smelters around them.

“Look, you people were paid in advance,” Brane said flatly. “Take the money and run.”

“I would rather kill you,” Bors said flatly.

The Dwarf's momentary distraction, however, had allowed Brane to move his wrist. The crystal rod in his wrist-sheath slid into his hand as he gestured, and he brought his hand up as the Dwarf spoke.

Lightning blasted in near-silence, smothered by the sound of industry around them. Bors stopped reaching for the firing lever, the arquebus falling from his suddenly convulsing fingers as he crumpled backwards.

A sickening stench of burnt meat rose from the charred and burned wound where the lightning bolt had entered underneath Bors' right shoulder and burned the insides of the man's chest to ash.

Brane re-sheathed the rod and stepped over the crumpled body. He needed a better plan than throwing street thugs at the Aeradi. Or, at the very least, he needed a better variety of 'street thug'.

The Dwarven sergeant sent his men to pursue the thugs, and stopped to check on the Aeradi. He approached Erik, who was standing dazedly in the center of the impromptu battleground.

“Are you in charge here?” he asked.

“No,” Erik replied, looking about for Tolars. Then he realized that the platoon sergeant was down – from the look of the wounds on the older man, from one of the grenade blasts. “He is,” he told the Dwarf softly, and looked at the shorter man. “Which means I guess I am.”

“You need a healer,” the Dwarf told him. It was not a question. He turned to the one man he'd kept with him. “Delds, run to the patrol house. Grab the Captain, the healer, and” – he pursed his lips in thought – “another squad for security.”

The younger Dwarf nodded and took off; taking his superior's command to 'run' at face value.

“I am afraid I will have to ask you to remain here,” the Sergeant told Erik, “at least until my superiors arrive. The healer will come with them, though.”

“I can live with that,” Erik said quietly, eyeing the marines around him. Most of them were still moving, if weakly, and the survivors and the walking wounded were doing their best to tend to the injured.

Four of the Aeradi, two from the grenade blast and two from horrible axe-wounds, weren't moving, however. They lay where they had fallen, mute testimony to the attack.

“I can live with that,” Erik repeated, and turned away to aid his men in dealing with the wounded.

Too many of the wounds were beyond any ability they had to help. Erik found himself stripping away armor and slicing up uniforms to bandage wounds and make tourniquets. He was aware, in the back of his mind, of the Dwarven soldiers returning and beginning to deal with the wounded of the attack that hadn't run away.

The Dwarves' first-aid to the thugs was rough and ready, but would keep them alive. Most of their attention went to helping the Aeradi deal with their own wounded.

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, more Dwarven soldiers arrived, accompanied by not one but two healers. Erik had never been happier to see anyone than he was to see the second healer: two more of the Aeradi had died while their comrades strove to save them.

With the arrival of the healers and more soldiers to help with the simpler forms of first-aid, Erik was freed to speak with the commander of the Dwarves. Dressed in identical chainmail to his men, the only way to identify him was by the simple crossed silver axes emblazoned on his helmet.

“Captain Held Eeroin,” the Dwarf introduced himself. “Commander, Sword Company, Third North Hold Security Battalion.” He surveyed the remnants of the Aeradi platoon, many of its men simply sitting or lying on the ground and being ministered to by either the healers or the Dwarven soldiers.