City in the Sky (35 page)

The first few moments seemed to prove Hendall's belief. His people were gaining on the Aeradi troops. They'd been clever, but they hadn't been clever enough. The city would be the Draconans, and
he
would be the one who'd opened the way.

He didn't realize there was another Aeradi force until the first volley of arrows dropped out of the sky like messengers of death.

The shipyards burned behind the Green of Third. They’d been too close to the landing zones to be left alone, and the presence of most of the Aeradi Regulars clumped together had proven too tempting for General Adaelis.

Kolanis’s orders had been clear through – he was to make one pass through the Newport Shipyards with the rest of the Third Strike Regiment to break up the Aeradi defenses, then move on to the inner city fortifications. 

He’d counted roughly four thousand Regulars in the defenses around the shipyards, but the Strike Regiments had ripped them apart. Fortifications were shattered and support weapons burned to ash.  Behind the Aeradi’s lines, they’d set dozens of under construction ships – including ten
battleships
– ablaze.

Further aerial support for the assault would require Kolanis to succeed in his
next
mission, but with five thousand Claws of the Dragon descending on the shattered defenders, the sky-major didn’t expect the Newport Regulars to last another twenty minutes.

Even if they, by some miracle, held, the dragons had already destroyed every vessel under construction and every yard they were building. It would be years before Newport could repair the damage his people had done.

Kolanis's attention was distracted by one of his scout dragons screaming. He glanced over at the dragon, and its Skyborne rider gave a hand signal and gestured down, towards the city.

The sky-major looked down and saw what the scout was gesturing towards. A battle was rapidly taking shape on the ground below. He cursed horribly, and felt Lalen scream her sense of his frustration.

His greens
couldn't
bombard ground forces. Their flame was too narrow, too focused. Their maneuverability made them good against fortifications, but they didn't have a wide enough spread to make strafing worth their while.

Then his lips split in a feral grin as he recalled the tablet resting in his saddlebag. He pulled it out and grabbed the stylus they'd given to go with it. It took a moment for him to locate the battle on his mental map of the city, but he'd memorized enough maps of Newport that it was only a moment.

'Enemy forces engaging infiltrators in Square of the Gods,' he scrawled on the tablet. 'Request Blacks for ground support.'

The letters rested on the tablet for several seconds, and then faded. A moment later, more letters appeared, a response. 'Adaelis agrees. Black of Ninth is en route. Maintain surveillance. If the Square is contested, the forts should be unmanned.’

Kolanis flashed over his mental map of the city and nodded with a cold grin. The Square was a choke point between the outer and inner cities. If there was a battle there, the infiltrators had probably stopped the defenses being manned.

Which meant the Black of Ninth was about to do what the Fifth had just done to the shipyards to the only troops who could man those forts.

Arrows pounded the Draconan force twice more before Erik's men hit it like a hammer striking glass. Neither force was heavily armored, but the Aeradi had the impetus of the attack. The Red Dragons shattered, the militia driving deep into them.

Erik stood in the first rank of his men, using his greater strength and size to help push the Draconans back. There was no time for tactics, simply the hammering of men against men.

Even as the Draconan lines broke, Erik found himself cutting down a Red Dragon attacking Ikeras, who stood by his side. A moment later, the
kep
non-com returned the favor, casually gutt
ing another Draconan before he reached Erik.

The Aeradi held their formations, and the archers continued to fire, carefully aiming at the back of the Draconan troops, breaking their cohesion even more. Without any apparent organization, the Red Dragon force was doomed.

Even as Erik came to that realization, he came face to face with what
had
to be a real Red Dragon. Four Aeradi troopers lay dead at the man's feet, and Erik's hindbrain catalogued several other such knots of resistance – where the
real
assassins were just barely managing to hold together groups of troops.

Erik drove forward without hesitation, lunging toward the assassin. His attack was parried, and the Draconan slashed at him, only to be blocked by Ikeras. Erik shared a quick glance with his non-com, and then the pair began to circle the assassin.

For a moment, the Red Dragon tried to keep his eyes on both of them. Quickly realizing he couldn’t, he began to retreat. With his eyes on his attackers, he wasn't paying enough attention to the ground, and he stumbled over an arrow-ridden Draconan body.

In the instant of his stumble, both Erik and Ikeras attacked. The assassin was good enough to parry Ikeras' attack, sending the older Aeraid stumbling to one side as the Draconan spun towards Erik.

No one could have been good enough to block
both
attacks, however, and Erik's old sky steel blade ripped into the man's side. The man's parry clattered useless off Erik's blade and he crumbled to the ground.

A moment's reprieve allowed Erik to pull Ikeras back to his feet, but before either could say a word, the heart-wrenching sound of a dragon's shriek tore the air in two.

Both men wheeled to stare up in horror as dozens – no,
hundreds
– of dragons swept down on the Square of the Gods.

Hendall had never imagined the sort of carnage the coordinated Aeradi arrow volleys were unleashing on his ranks. Any chance of them catching the first group shattered under that steel-tipped rain, and was ground under when the Aeradi infantry smashed into his men.

The Red Dragon found himself caught up in the motion of his men as they split around the Aeradi assault. For a moment, he was helpless, and could only watch as the soldiers – surely only militia! – butchered his men like hapless sheep.

Then the line reached him, and he found himself fighting for his life. One on one, he was far better trained than the Aeradi. But the little sky-men fought in groups, splitting the Draconans up and matching four or five of them, with their lighter shields and longer swords, against each of the larger men.

One of those groups came straight for him, as others sliced apart the soldiers around him. Two soldiers managed to stick with Hendall in the chaos, and he faced the five Aeradi with them at his sides.

With a snarl, the assassin lunged forward, dodging nimbly around the longer sword of the lead Aeradi to gut the man with his dragonclaw shortsword. As he gutted the leader, though, two more attacked him. He dodged one blade, but the other slashed across his shoulder, opening the arrow wound even wider.

The other two had gone after the soldier on Hendall's left, who now lay on the ground, choking on his own blood with an Aeradi sword through his lung. The owner of the sword, however, was silent on the ground, the Draconan's blade having opened his throat.

Gritting his teeth against the pain in his shoulder, Hendall parried the attack of one of the remaining soldiers, only to have another get by his guard and score along his chest. The soldier with him managed to fend off his own attacker, however, and ran through the Aeraid who had sliced Hendall as that man finished his stroke.

There was a moment's pause, and then the two surviving Aeradi attacked together, and before Hendall could react, the soldier with him was down in a flurry of blades. He took an Aeraid with him, and Hendall cut the other down as he turned back to the assassin.

Wounded, bloody and battered, Hendall stared around him in horror. The battle was chaotic, and disastrous. Even in the chaos, it was clear that the Aeradi were driving his men back, and slaughtering them in the process. Only where the full agents stood did any of the Red Dragons seem to be holding their own, and those knots of resistance were being overwhelmed.

Even as his horror overwhelmed him, though, he heard the cries of the dragons, and looked to the sky with a feral grin. An entire
regiment
of blacks, the soldiers on their backs aiming cannon and crys-bows, swept down from the sky.

With a weary cheer, Hendall raised his sword in salute. For one glorious moment, he
knew
the battle was won. The Aeradi had no weapons to strike at the dragons!

Then the roar of cannon-fire rang over the battlefield. It took Hendall a moment to realize the dragons hadn't fired. By the end of that moment, the first dragons fell from the sky.

He spun in horror to watch the inner fortifications being to light up with the red and white flashes of cannon and crys-bow fire. He'd forgotten the first group of Aeradi they'd seen. The ones who had been headed to the forts.

For an eternal moment, the Red Dragon Hendall watched the forts rip dragons from the sky, knowing he'd failed. Then an Aeradi tachi he never saw put an end to his failure.

Kolanis and the Green of Third had been ordered to a high covering position over Black of Ninth, which meant he was in a perfect position to watch the entire battalion fly headlong into a hail of fire.

It started at the forts right next to the gate, but rippled out from there, obviously as men reached and manned the forts. Blacks were big dragons, tough dragons, but
no
dragon was tough enough to stand up to cannonballs and lightning bolts.

He grabbed the tablet he'd been given. “Attacking forts to relieve Black of Ninth. Kolanis.” he scrawled on it, and turned to gesture his commands to his men.

Even as Kolanis raised his hands to issue his commands, the tablet burnt hot and he looked down at it. “Negative,” it said flatly, in a script very different from the previous handwriting. “Withdraw,” the message continued, and then, in case he hadn't guessed who was given these orders, the signature: “Adaelis.”

Gritting his teeth, Kolanis gave the gesture-commands to withdraw.

Section by section, the Skyborne of his battalion peeled back. Below them, the Blacks of the Black of Ninth were trying their best to do the same.

But someone
else
had been watching, and even as the first Blacks began to win free of the range of the guns, sudden crys-bow fire ripped them from the air.

Cursing aloud, Kolanis turned Lalen towards the source of the flame. He cursed again at the sight before him: the remaining battleships and frigates of the Newport Sky Fleet sweeping in from above towards the forts in attack formation, weapons blazing fire.

This time, the Draconan didn't wait for orders. If those ships weren't driven back,
all
of the Black of Ninth would be wiped out. With one gesture of his spear, he sent all two hundred dragons of his battalion surging towards the Aeradi skyships.

Whoever was in command had expected that, however, and all nine of the frigates turned to meet his battalion, and the wing-lancers he'd thought the city didn't have came with them. There were only a handful of lancers, less than fifty, but Kolanis' hopes died with the sight of them.

Nonetheless, he led his Skyborne into the teeth of the skyships and their defenders, trying desperately to break through, to open a gap that would allow
any
of the Black of Ninth to escape.

After a moment, the battle narrowed itself down to himself and Lalen, and trying to stay alive. The wing-lancer's rocs danced their way around his dragons, but he saw some of those dances end in fire, and knew his men were giving their best.

Even as he saw rocs die, however, a lancer came plummeting in at Lalen. Before their joined mind could react, the Aeraid threw a javelin, hard. The steel-tipped lance scored along Lalen's side, leaving black ichor to ooze out onto her scales.

The wound was minor, however, and didn't stop the Bond twisting in the air and burning the roc from the sky. Kolanis felt nothing but satisfaction as the great bird disintegrated under the fire and its rider's scream echoed through the air.

Another javelin's slicing through the air interrupted his satisfaction as it sank deep into Lalen's back, barely missing his own leg. With a curse, Kolanis reached down and yanked the shaft free. The dragon's roar of pain echoed loudly in his ears, but the wound was less restrictive on her motions than the shaft would have been.

Which was good, for a moment later, one of the frigates came into range of the Bond and opened fire. The dragon only barely avoided the cannonball that shot through the air where she'd been a moment before.

Her scream now was of rage, and Kolanis let her rage flow through the bond and into him. With a battle-roar of his own, he kneed Lalen towards the offending frigate. He knew through her senses that other dragons had fallen in around him, and he led them in a spiraling attack on the frigate.