The homestead was battered and dilapidated. The remains of rope bridges hung at its sides, their treads long since decayed and fallen away. Deflated water sacs were home to large gray fungi. Its roof had cracked and crazed, and even from close to the ground Lenora could see that large slabs of rock were missing.
The machine’s legs had disappeared, and now its inhabitants pulled it on a carpet of logs.
A hundred people tugged on thick ropes, a hundred more pushed. Dozens of large cattle and a few bedraggled horses were attached in leather harnesses, whipped on by rovers standing on their backs. The machine moved minutely, creaking and cracking some of the logs underneath, and the people strained as they tried to find somewhere better. It was a monumental effort for minimal results, and Lenora wondered whether this same machine had been moving in the same direction for three hundred years.
She ordered the Krote army to halt and they watched for a while, amazed that none of the homestead rovers seemed to have seen or heard them. The light was poor, but the moonlight seemed to like these new machines of war, glinting from sharp edges and making their stony parts almost luminescent.
“How hopeless,” Lenora said.
The rovers pushing and pulling their giant, broken home were all heavily muscled, and yet they appeared tired and weak. Their feet were large and flat, their hands knotted into stumpy pads. Lights burned in a few of the homestead’s windows, and Lenora wondered at the hierarchy that allowed people to remain inside. The rulers, obviously. Tribal heads. Those with power or charisma, who could command the others to do their bidding.
The machine moved a step as they watched. Many people sank to the ground, while others dragged several stripped trees from the rear to the front. They placed them behind the harnessed cattle and horses, forcing them beneath the front edge of the homestead with heavy wooden hammers. Then they walked back to the rear and took up position again.
So here was the first real test. For three centuries the Mages had plundered the tribes and races of the huge land of Dana’Man and its neighboring islands, adding to their army, training it, instilling a hatred of Noreela-a land none of that army had ever seen and many had never heard of. Down the decades old warriors had died and new had been born, until a large proportion of the army was Krote through and through. Different toned skins, different hair, some tall, some short…yet all Krote. Bred to fight. Born to kill, and aid the Mages in their revenge.
Now Lenora would begin to see how dedicated this army could be. The battle for Conbarma had been a fight; this would be a slaughter.
Lenora turned around and spoke to the Krotes within earshot. “It’s a sad first challenge,” she said, “but it’s practice for your machines.” She nodded, and half a dozen warriors moved forward.
The rovers saw them at last. Some stood upright and dropped their ropes, rubbing their hands as if to massage some feeling back in. Others turned and ran behind the machine. The men and women whipping the cattle dropped their lashes, and the cattle relaxed, heavy ropes dipping into the grass, animals slumping to their knees and baying in pain and relief.
A few windows in the machine grew dark as the fires inside were extinguished.
Six Krote machines walked across a field of low, ropy plants, and the screaming began.
A hail of arrows dropped onto the advancing Krotes from atop the homestead, and they returned fire. A body fell to the ground, arms and legs thrashing. Another slid down the side of the huge structure and snagged on a rope, swinging there as blood darkened the stone below it.
The rovers who had been pushing the homestead ran, and two machines went in pursuit. One of them flailed its long metal arms, harvesting the people. The other machine coughed a wide spray of fire before it, lighting the dim scene. It stomped across its burning victims, crushing them into the undergrowth.
The other four machines reached the homestead. One Krote started slaughtering the cattle, using a crossbow to kill individual creatures while her mount fired a dozen spiked balls at a time from rents in its fleshy hide. A rover leapt from one of the horses and came at her, fearless and mad. The Krote let him get close before putting a bolt through his mouth.
More arrows were slipping from shadows as those within the homestead recognized that they were under attack. The Krotes went inside.
Lenora sat back on her machine and watched the display. Any anxiousness quickly melted away, and she felt a sense of satisfaction. These rovers had been battling to survive for centuries, and their history would be wiped out in minutes. It could be the same for all of Noreela. The timescales would differ, perhaps, but the result would be the same. In a few moments these rovers’ wraiths would be wandering with no one to chant them down, and their future would have been erased.
But that vision, Lenora thought, with no room for survivors of any kind. She shook her head. Symbolism. Angel was fond of it, and she had used its touch to show Lenora what she wanted for Noreela.
Lenora could sense the effort every other Krote had to expend to refrain from joining in. The stench of burning flesh filled the air, and it was a smell that most of them had not experienced for some time. There were some with her who had landed at Conbarma several days before-captains now, blooded with Noreela’s first blood-but most of these warriors had not seen battle since long before departing Dana’Man. Therehad been fighting there, when the Krotes launched expeditions east or west along the seemingly endless island and encountered primitive tribes and settlements. And there were more ferocious enemies the farther afield they went, leaving the shores of Dana’Man and venturing out into uncharted and unexplored waters. On those unknown islands were unknown things, and some of them had offered a challenge.
But never anything like this. This was a slaughter. And this blood, spilled so easily, smelled of triumph.
Lenora breathed in deeply, and the last scream of a dying woman drifted away across the Cantrass Plains.
Scattered fires illuminated the scene, giving a deeper darkness to the middle distance. Bodies burned, spitting and gushing geysers of bluish flame. The windows of the homestead flickered like blinking eyes. The rear of the old machine seemed to blur and slip, and a great section of it melted away from the rest, the glowing acid flowing thick with dissolved rock, metal and flesh.
Sweet revenge? a voice said deep inside, ambiguous, and Lenora was strong, she could listen. The future was filled with vengeance, and one would feed the other.
With the shade of her daughter whispering to her, she led the Krote army south across the Cantrass Plains.
LENORA KEPT HER eight hundred Krotes and their machines with her. They split into four groups, maintaining contact with one another by means of small flying constructs, several dozen of which had split off from some of the larger machines and formed themselves from air, earth and rock. There was a hint of the shade’s workings in these things, but they did more than simply flit through the air like bats. The first time one of them landed before Lenora on the back of her mount she cringed away, waiting for it to sprout arms and legs, a head or some other less obvious appendage. But it remained motionless, a thing the size of her fist with only a grilled opening at one end to mar its smoothness.
And then it spoke.
Since then Lenora and her captains had been in constant communication, though the landscape often meant that they were out of sight. They spoke of the battle to come with both eagerness and concern, but none of them considered anything farther ahead. None of them spoke of a time beyond war.