Dragonfly Falling (74 page)

Another heliopter – and
she thought it might be the last – trailed fire over the Ant ranks, and the
Wasps were fighting furiously, their line buckling slowly but hundreds of their
soldiers coursing back and forth over the heads of the enemy, lancing down with
their stings at any visible weak point. The telescope was revealing too much to
her now, all the bloody work that war was, dripping red swords and faces
twisted in pain. More and more Wasps were rushing into the fray to shore their
line up, until their full numbers had been committed and they could stop the
Ants from encircling them. The warriors of the Ancient League were scattering
all over the field in knots of ten or twenty, launching sudden attacks against
the Wasp flanks and then falling back, or sending arrows high to kill
unsuspecting soldiers in the centre of the Wasp lines. Che sensed that all that
had gone before was but prologue to this moment, the soldiers of both sides now
dying in their hundreds. In the air were the remaining flying machines,
surrounded by the Wasp light airborne that latched onto them and cut at their
cables and controls, and also by giant insects – the Wasps’ own namesakes –
that were urged on by unarmoured riders brandishing lances and crossbows.

She heard the roaring of
the automotives even over all the clamour of battle, and then the Ant lines
were splitting, as if by some pre-planned clockwork mechanism. A lead-shot
strike caved in the front of one vehicle, which began to gout smoke. Another
shot punched into the packed Ant lines, smashing through the centre of one
formation, and then raking the side of the one immediately behind, leaving
three dozen dead at a stroke. The Wasps surged forwards at some points, held
back at others, and the automotives drove on like hammers, nailbows shooting
until they jammed, and the Wasp line was broken like porcelain, all its unity
lost.

In the centre the
remaining sentinels had formed a fighting square and were contesting to the
last with pike and shield, seeming nigh-invulnerable in their all-encasing
armour, but there were Wasps fleeing backwards all along the line, getting in
each other’s way, even fighting with one another, and the Ant advance continued
as steadily as before.

The city was running
short of places to house the wounded, let alone the dead. Where the messenger
took Stenwold was one of the College’s workshops where apprentice artificers
had toiled and studied in happier times. Into a small room beyond a long hall
that was almost carpeted with the ice-packed dead they had brought the body,
and laid it on an artificer’s work table. This unknowingly appropriate gesture
affected Stenwold more deeply than anything else.

They had not been able
to get Scuto’s body to lie flat, of course, what with the hunchback and the
man’s other deformities, and so it was resting on its side, looking as awkward
in death as life, propped up on its own projections that had scratched long
lines into the wood as they had worked him off the stretcher. Amidst all those
spines and thorns and burned, blistered skin, they had not cared to remove the
three quills of crossbow bolts that were sunk deep into Scuto’s flesh. Stenwold
was sure that they had been the final death of him, and not the grenade that
had scorched across his nut-brown skin and smashed one of his hands. Scuto had
always been a tough one.

His mockery of a face,
that had resembled nothing more than a grotesque puppet carved idly from wood,
was locked in a grimace that showed all his hooked teeth. Stenwold put a hand
out to close his friend’s eyes, but managed only to spike himself on one of the
Thorn Bug’s points.

Scuto had been pulled
from the Sarnesh automotive that had blocked the breach, and Stenwold realized
that if he had stayed a moment longer he would have witnessed it himself. Scuto
had been dead before they had ever drawn him out, though. There would have been
no last words, no farewells. Stenwold understood that only one of the Sarnesh
Lorn detachment had survived, and she was not expected to live long despite all
the doctors were doing for her.

‘Why?’ Stenwold asked.
‘Why did he come?’ He looked up at Balkus, and saw the man’s normally solid
features twisted in grief. Balkus, he recalled, had known Scuto a long time, at
least as long as Stenwold himself.

‘He always looked after
his people,’ the Ant said. ‘He must have heard about the siege here. We were
his people, Stenwold – you and me. Waste and blast the bloody man. Did he think
I couldn’t take care of myself?’ Balkus’s fist slammed down on the table. ‘You
stupid, stupid bastard! What did you think you were doing?’ There were no tears
on the big man’s face, but his voice, the utter loss in his voice, more than
made up for it. Ants grieved privately and mind to mind, Stenwold knew, but
Balkus had been away from his own kind for many years, had forgotten the touch
of their company, and his pain came out in words just like any other kinden’s.

Stenwold tried to
picture those last terrible moments in the automotive, the desperate fighting
hand to hand, the grenade’s explosion, the driver trying to keep control of the
racing vehicle, trying to get it within the walls of Collegium, past the Vekken
soldiers and their crossbows.

It came to him that for
once he had done the right thing in sending all the others off: Che and
Achaeos, Tisamon and Tynisa. For once, at least, where Stenwold now was had
become the place
not
to be.

I am
running out of friends.
Scuto was the oldest and the closest of the
dead, but he had Kymon on his conscience too, and poor Doctor Nicrephos, and so
many of the faces that he had been introduced to so recently, only to have them
snuffed out in the fighting – people like Joyless Greatly, like Cabre who had
manned the harbour defences, or Tseitus in his submersible.

‘What time is it?’ he
called out. ‘Anyone know?’

‘I think I heard the
third clock not long ago,’ Arianna said. She had been keeping prudently out of
the way, by the door.

‘Until dawn, then?’

‘Two hours and half an
hour more, Stenwold. No more.’

‘We should try for at
least some sleep,’ he said tiredly.

‘The Vekken will be back
with the dawn, and they have made a breach now. I do not know how we can keep
them out of it.’

‘I’m not going to sleep,
not tonight,’ Balkus said flatly. ‘I’m going to go to that breach, and when
they come I’m going to kill every bloody Vekken I see. And when I run out of
ammunition I’ll use my sword, and when that breaks I’ll use my fists.’ He was a
stranger then, broad-shouldered and threatening, an Ant setting about doing
what Ants were best at, which was killing their own kind.

Stenwold had thought
that the Vekken would have to come over the crashed automotive to take control
of the breach, and he had his soldiers lined up with crossbows ready to shoot
them as they crested the top, but his lookout had just called from the broken
wall and told him that they were bringing up a ram. A ramming engine, if they
could coax it up the mound of debris, would punch the automotive aside in just
a few blows, leaving the breach wide open for the Vekken infantry to rush in.
Taking over Kymon’s command, Stenwold had gathered every man and woman who
could hold the line and placed them here, but the Vekken soldiers were better
at close work by far. This would be the last stand, he knew, the last moment
before the Vekken surged into the city and overran it.

The
Great College
, he thought,
the Assembly, the Sarnesh
alliance
. All the centuries of innovation, philosophy, art and diplomacy
that had been hatched within these walls, and now the ignorant hands of the
Vekken would carry it away and dismantle it.

‘Artillery’s ready, War
Master,’ one of his artificers reported. The wall had been judged too unsteady
to mount more engines on it, but they had found from somewhere a pair of
ballistae, and he had them flanking his forces on either side now. One was a
light repeater, the other a massive and ancient Ant-made piece they must have
dredged from a museum. It would probably do no more than loose a single bolt.

‘Angle so that you can
hit the ram, when it starts to push the automotive out of the way,’ he told
them, knowing that by then it would already be too late, that the breach would
be well opened.

On the walls, in place
of the artillery, he had posted everyone else: old men and women, the injured,
the young and a plethora of Fly-kinden who would only get trampled underfoot in
a ground-level melee, all up there with whatever they could get their hands on.
Some had crossbows, but others had hunting bows, stonebows, even slings and
rocks for throwing. Some industrious citizens had even carried a few dozen of
the fallen stones from the wall up to its top, to pitch over onto the Vekken.

Even as he looked up at
them the shooting started, men and women of Collegium putting their heads over
the battlements to let slip a bolt or arrow or stone and then ducking down
fast. The clatter of answering quarrels came fast after, and Stenwold saw
several, the slow or the unlucky, hurled back from the wall within the first
few seconds.

‘Stand ready!’ he called
to his forces. He wanted to deliver an encouraging speech, such as the one
Kymon had given, but he, whose life had been measured in words often enough,
found himself without them.

He had already found a
greying militia officer to be his second in the all too likely event that
something happened to him. Third in command was Balkus because, if it came to
that, they would need the man’s fighting spirit more than any gifts of
leadership.

‘Heads up,’ the Ant
muttered to him, and he scanned the wall, looking for some new threat. Balkus
was glancing backwards, though, and he turned to see Arianna running to join
him.

‘No!’ he shouted at her.
‘Wait for me back at the house, please!’

‘What kind of fool do
you think I am?’ she asked him. She had found a leather cuirass from somewhere,
and there was a strung shortbow over her shoulder. ‘If you fail here, do you
think they won’t kill me anyway?’

‘But . . . I want . . .’
I want you to be safe.
He stared at her helplessly,
and with pointed determination she took her bow and nocked an arrow to it.

‘Let her fight,’ Balkus
said. ‘We need her. You’ve seen all who’s left here. We need everyone.’

‘The ram’s coming in!’
the lookout shouted. A glance at the archers on the walls showed that they were
shooting almost straight down now, and that others were heaving great stones up
to the lip of the battlements.

‘Artillery ready!’
Stenwold shouted, and drew his sword. Between the Vekken and Arianna, he did
not see the strength his followers derived from that simple, calm motion.

There was a hollow boom,
and the automotive jumped a foot forwards, and then slid another foot down the
loose stones, and Stenwold could hear the ram’s engines straining, imagined its
toothed wheels clawing for traction.

‘And loose!’ shouted the
artillerist artificer, and the repeating crossbow began its work, sending bolt
after bolt, as fast as Stenwold’s heart was beating, into the gap the ram had
created between the automotive and the wall. The big old ballista had misfired,
and six men were frantically rewinding it, cranking the string back while the
bolt was replaced.

‘Shields ready!’
Stenwold called out, and his rabble of citizens and militia formed up into a
mockery of a military formation. Every single man or woman with any kind of
shield stood in the front rank, some with no more than a few nailed-together
planks on a leather strap as a handle. At each end stood the archers, crossbows
levelled shakily, or arrows ready at the string. Arianna had run to join them. The
look of desperate bravery on her face made his heart ache, and all the more so
because it was mirrored on every face around her.

With a tremendous crack
the ancient ballista hurled its eight-foot bolt forwards, the wooden arms
shattering into pieces with the force, but the missile drove straight through
the ram’s hull, and Stenwold saw a sudden venting of smoke and heard the engine
squeal in protest and then die.

There was a great cheer
from the defenders, for the ram had gained a gap of no more than four feet
either side of the automotive for the Vekken to press through, but then the
Vekken were coming regardless, surging through the gaps in tight order with
their shields raised. The repeating ballista slammed its bolts into them,
knocking them back two or three at a time, and stones were pushed off the
battlements above to crash down into the packed intruders, battering their
shields aside. Arianna and the other archers needed no further orders now. They
were shooting into the Vekken as they came, arrows and bolts and slingstones
bouncing from shields or whipping past them. For a moment, one mad moment, it
seemed that the Vekken did not have the force to seize the gaps, that they
would be driven back so that the defenders could retake those narrow breaks and
hold them against all comers.

They were Ant-kinden,
though, and in the simple business they were engaged in there were no finer
soldiers anywhere, and once that moment of hope had gone, they pushed through,
despite the bolts and the stones, and over the heaped bodies of their kin, and
onto Collegium ground.

As soon as he saw that
the archers could not hold them, Stenwold drew a great breath and cried out,
‘Forwards!’ and, because there was no time to wait, he was first in, trusting
to them to follow where he took them.

He met the Ants with
their shield-line, and without expectations, but he was an old fighter. No Ant
soldier, but he had held a blade for longer than these Vekken men and women had
been alive. In those first seconds he surprised himself by killing two of the
enemy, lunging past their shields as they skidded on the last loose stones. On
either side the mismatched shields of Collegium pressed, and there was still a
fair barrage falling on the enemy from above.