Dragonfly Falling (77 page)

Che looked round, and
saw that she had left it very nearly too late to do the sensible thing. She ran
for the last big transporter, clutching at the rungs and slats. It had already
started to move, and she felt her grip slipping. She called out, but the driver
was only listening for the voices in his head. She stumbled helplessly—

One of the Sarnesh
inside leant over, caught her by her belt and lifted her in effortlessly. There
were Wasps passing over them now, but most were starting to turn back, not
wanting to get too far from the main body of their army. The vehicle’s driver
flung the machine forwards over the uneven ground, aiming for the line of the
rails, and Che heard a kind of whistling noise that she barely had time to
register.

Something caught her a
massive blow across the head, the slats of the automotive’s side slamming into
her as the ball of metal from the leadshotter ripped through the back of the
automotive in a maelstrom of jagged shards. The automotive was suddenly veering
around. All around her the Sarnesh were leaping out even before the vehicle had
come to a halt. Che was too stunned to follow, lying in the automotive’s belly
with her head spinning. A moment later there was a muffled crack from the
engine and the machine was enveloped in smoke.

Choking, gasping, Che
drew her sword, half jumping and half falling from the back of the vehicle as
it ground to a stop. Everywhere she looked, there were Wasps. Behind her the
train and the automotives were retreating towards Sarn, and she had the single
candle-flame of comfort that at least Achaeos was on one of them. The others
who had been unlucky enough to be on the last automotive out were fighting
already, falling to the swords and stings of the Wasps. She felt herself begin
to tremble, her sword shake in her hand.

So ended what would
become known as the Battle of the Rails.

In the last few days
Stenwold had become an old hand at estimating the numbers of soldiers. Now he
looked at the citizens of Collegium who had joined him at the wharf front and
knew he had less than one hundred and twenty.

The armourclad had been
hauled around now in the harbour, and a great, wide-beamed ship was coasting
through the gap, with grey sails piled far higher than the ruins of the harbour
towers. Its bow was square and there were men there manhandling a folding
bridge, and beyond them the rails were lined with armoured forms.

‘We have no chance
here!’ Stenwold told his tiny force. ‘The Vekken are breaking in at the west
wall even as we speak, and we cannot hold them here. Go back to your families.
Go back to your wives and husbands and children. There is no sense in your
staying here.’

‘What will you do, War
Master?’ one of them asked him.

‘I will remain,’
Stenwold said heavily. ‘When they dock I will see if the word of one Master of
Collegium can yet carry weight, but you must go, all of you.’

He heard some take him
up on his offer, but when he looked round he still had more than a hundred
remaining.

The great ship was
coming in, coasting with a terrible grace. The sails were being furled and
there were two anchor-chains in the water to slow her as she approached the
charred wood of the wharves.

‘Stenwold,’ Arianna said
in awe. ‘That isn’t a Vekken ship.’

He looked from her to
the approaching vessel, and back again. ‘How do you know?’

‘Because that’s a
Spiderlands ship out of Seldis, and I ought to know my own people’s work.’

Stenwold gaped at her
and then at the ship. The bridge was coming down now that the ship was yards
from its berth. ‘Hold your shot!’ he told his men.

A Spiderlands ship. He
saw her sleek lines, the pattern of waves and arabesques that decorated her
rails – but those rails were lined with Ant shields.

The bridge struck the
wharves, and his men began backing up nervously, fingering their crossbows and
swords.
If it is the Vekken, then a surrender offered here,
without a shot loosed, may buy these men their lives.
‘Hold still!’
Stenwold told them.

And the Ant-kinden
coursed out onto the Collegium docks, forming up even as they did so into a
fighting square. They were not the glossy onyx of Vek, though, their skins were
pallid, pale as fishbellies.

Tarkesh
Ants. What is going on?
Stenwold moved forward, more to keep a distance
between these newcomers and his own ragged followers. His people were nervous,
and seeing these new Ants assemble, moving from shipboard to land in impeccable
order, was not helping them.

‘Identify yourselves.
You are on the soil of Collegium!’ he shouted. He had the feeling of every set
of too-similar eyes on him, all those swords and crossbows, directed straight
at him.

One man broke from their
ranks, slinging his shield. He regarded Stenwold without expression, unknowable
conversations passing through his mind. ‘You speak for Collegium?’ he asked.

‘I am Master Maker of
the Great College. What is your business here? We are not at our best to
receive visitors,’ Stenwold said, thinking,
If this goes
badly, then I take the brunt. At least Arianna has a chance to get clear of it.

The Tarkesh officer
smiled grimly. ‘I am Mercenary-Commander Parops, formerly of Tark. I hear you
have a little Vekken infestation.’

One of Stenwold’s men
exclaimed and pointed, and then they were all rushing to the broken edge of the
wharves to stare out to sea. The Ants shifted, but only to give them a clearer
view. Something was burning out on the water, sheets of flame shooting forty
feet in the air, and Stenwold saw that it was one of the Vekken supply barges.
There were little copper-hulled ships out there, darting through the waters with
steaming funnels, gallantly doing battle with the remaining Vekken armourclads
and blazing away with flame cannon at the other barges, which were already
starting to smoke. Stenwold saw one of the little ships blown apart as a
leadshot from an armourclad struck its steam engine, but the others were
nipping nimbly through the hail of shot and loosing their own weapons.

Larger, flat-hulled
boats were meanwhile driving through the waves to make a landing west of the
city, packed with soldiers, and beyond them all another half-dozen of the
elegant Spiderlands galleons were tacking wide of the fighting, whilst smaller
sailing ships with high forecastles made passes against the armourclads,
showering the Vekken sailors with arrows. It was only for a moment that Stenwold
watched that slow melee, the sails of the Spiderlands frigates a nimble
elegance against the lumbering ironclads. He saw one of the Vekken ships
listing, Spider-kinden marines fighting on its decks with grim desperation. The
wooden ships were fleet, but when the Vekken caught them they were matchwood in
short order. Still, the sea was full of sails. It was an entire fleet that the
Spiderlands had sent them. The Vekken navy, already diminished by its assaults
on the harbour, was falling to their numbers and to their grace.

‘Stenwold,’ Arianna
hissed to him. ‘The wall!’

‘Commander,’ Stenwold
said, bringing his mind back to his responsibilities. ‘The Vekken are in at the
west wall.’

‘Take us there,’ Parops
instructed him. ‘And we shall turn them out again.’

The Vekken rushed into
the city, desperate to flood their soldiers past the breach, to set foot at
last on the conquered enemy ground. When they were past the wall there was a
moment of confusion. Akalia’s plan had gone so far and no further. The wall was
down, the city was therefore taken.

But the people of
Collegium did not see it that way. There was no surrender. Even as the Vekken
formed up in the wall’s curving shadow, the arrows and the sling stones fell on
them, rattling from their shields, bouncing from their mail. There were men,
women and children at the windows of every house, throwing rocks, loosing
crossbows. Impromptu lines of citizens formed before the orderly Vekken
advance, armed with clubs, with spears. Every house became an archer’s platform,
every street a choke-point. The Vekken advance was never halted, but it was
slow, so slow. Two streets from the wall and a house they were passing suddenly
erupted in fire and stone, razored shards scything through the tight-packed
Vekken ranks, killing scores of them. As the invaders recoiled and recovered,
the people of Collegium were in the next houses, shooting down at them. Girls
of twelve, old women of seventy, Fly-kinden publicans and fat Beetle
shopkeepers, grocers and clerks and cooks swarmed from doorways and alleyways,
holding their knives and chair-legs, their scavenged waster bows and stolen
Vekken shields. In the fore, always in the fore, was a giant Sarnesh Ant-kinden
with a nailbow and paired shortswords. He became the man the Vekken hated most,
the man they needed to kill. A crossbow bolt found his shoulder. A sword-stroke
had riven the armour over his hip. He refused to fall. To the Vekken it seemed
that he even refused to bleed.

Another house detonated
to the Vekken rear, and every building of Collegium had become their enemy. The
call was going out for artificers, but the streets were so full of Vekken
soldiers, their advance backing up all the way to the wall, that no engineers
could have got through.

A grey-haired Fly-kinden
woman almost fell on Stenwold and his new allies in her eagerness to intercept
him. With commendable precision she got out her report on what the people of
Collegium were sacrificing for their city. The persistence of his own people
astonished Stenwold, and even more so because by now there was no command,
nothing from the Assembly that could order the defence. The street-by-street
stalling, the sabotage of their own homes, this all represented the men and
women of Collegium taking their fate into their own hands.

Parops digested the
situation quickly. ‘Have people lead my men to each major thoroughfare before
their advance,’ he said. ‘People who can explain that we’re on your side. We
will hold the Vekken as long as we need, and holding them is all that needs doing.’

Stenwold recalled the
landing craft he had seen. ‘There are a great deal of Vekken out there,
Commander,’ he warned.

Parops’s face lacked
something human in it. ‘That’s my employers’ problem, Master Maker, but they
have brought a great many troops.’

‘But
why?
’ Stenwold demanded.

‘Does it matter? Now let
us do our work,’ Parops cut him off.

Arianna clung to
Stenwold’s good arm, practically dancing with glee, watching the Tarkesh rush
into their time-honoured calling of killing the Ants of other cities.

*

Tactician Akalia stared
at the flames of her barges and could not understand what was happening to her
war. An open call had gone out to every man and woman of her officers to
explain it to her, and not one had the answer. A mass of ships had crept up on
them at night from who-knew-where, and was going about the savage business of
finishing her entire fleet. There were little sparks in her head that were the
masters of her vessels, and they were flickering out, one by one, each giving
his life and his ship for the greater glory of Vek, and leaving nothing but
ripples in his wake.

Tactician!
We must withdraw troops from the siege!

No!
We are inside the wall
, she threw back.

But,
Tactician, they are coming for us!
And she saw through the eyes of the
officer the approaching ships already close to beaching on the shore. The
soldiers left in the camp were already rushing to intercept them, but the vast
majority of the Vekken force was up about the walls of Collegium.

Bring
the force back from the north wall
, she decided.
Our
men here will hold the enemy until then
.

Even as she thought it,
her men at the beach were dying. For a panicked moment nobody realized why, but
then she saw that there were repeating ballistae mounted on the front corners
of the flat-bottomed craft, and as the Vekken soldiers came to repel the
beachhead they were being systematically shot down. Some managed a ragged
shield-wall, and began to return shot with crossbows, but then the first of the
craft had ground on the sand of the beach.

Men with skins like
burnished copper were leaping out. They wore long hauberks of the same colour,
mail with rings of incredible fineness, and long oval shields with a
distinctive notch cut into them. Many of them were fitting repeating crossbows
to those notches even now, advancing on the diminishing Vekken while they began
to loose. Others were lifting the ballistae from the bows of their boats and
running forward with them to where artificers were setting up three-legged
mounts for them.

She instructed the men
coming back from the north wall to pick up their pace.

Tactician,
we are encountering heavy resistance within the city!

No
excuses!
she snapped. There could
be
no
excuses, now, for failing to capture Collegium: not these newcomers of unknown
kinden, not the new ships, not any device of the Beetle academics.

But,
Tactician, we are facing soldiers from Tark, several hundred at least.

The situation began to
slip from her fingers. Tarkesh, in Collegium? Even as she considered it, the
last of her men at the beach died. Too few to mount a proper defence, they had
been outflanked and shot down. Now the enemy was rushing up the beach, and two
hundred yards inland lay the Vekken camp, all but undefended.

Withdraw
all from the camp and join the northern force
, she decided.
Then we shall sweep them back into the sea
.

Tactician!
The eastern force is under attack!