‘Get away from the shore! Get away! Into the streets! Quick!’ They'd broken through at the end of the jetty. More attackers were dashing past them. Out in the dawn smoke over the jetties other ships loomed. Wood snapped and splintered. Lightning flashed and thundered back and forth. The Taiytakei with the golden armour was urging them on and now he had others around him, more of the night-skins in their shimmering colours and their cloaks of bright feathers. They had short stabbing swords at their sides, their black rods too, but in their hands were the lightning wands, cracking and fizzing thunderbolts all around them. They carried shields, huge things of glass and gold, and spiked ashgars over their backs. Up and down the shore among the handful of ships that had rammed the jetties, smoke lay over a sea full of bobbing boats, oars straining furiously for the land. The throbbing noise was louder. Across the waves flashes and booms surrounded the island that the fleet had passed in the pre-dawn twilight as they'd lit their first fire-ships. Within the smoke the water was ablaze with misty glowing shapes, burning hulks and wreckage and pools of fire that floated and seemed to burn the very water itself. The sun had cracked the horizon far out to sea, shining straight though the carnage and the haze, throwing everything into silhouette. Tuuran could see all three of the islands now. The one they'd passed was low and shrouded in smoke while bolts of lightning flared like the sun, one and then another and another. The middle of the three islands, the tallest, must have been a mile away across the sea and he still had to tip his head back to look at the top of it. A great column of rock, sheer sides rising out of the water. With the rising sun behind it, its top glowed with golden fire. The third sloped up from the sea to the meet the cliffs of the second. A bridge crossed the chasm between, gleaming in the dawn with a dazzling fiery gold.
The golems were falling one by one. They fought without thought, swinging their clubs at any who came within range. The stabbing swords and spears of the sword-slaves wounded their rubbery skin, but Tuuran, with his axe and quick feet, he was the one to finish them, fast enough to get in close and split them apart before their clubs could shatter him. They were slow, too slow to be much danger to a man with his eyes open and his wits sharp. ‘Next!’ He sliced the legs from one and buried the head of his axe into the side of another. ‘And again! More! Harder! Give me something that can fight!’
‘Move! Clear the shore!’ The ships out in the water were turning, those that weren't broken or shattered burning wrecks. ‘Get away! Get away!’ He had no idea who was shouting. He hacked at another golem's leg and it staggered. One heaved its club at him. He ducked and it struck the first golem in the face, splitting it open. The crippled golem sagged to the ground, black liquid pooling around it. Another rocket exploded on the dockside and then a whole string of them rained down, falling on the end of the jetty and on the ship he and Crazy Mad had stormed; and on their own ship too, engulfing everything in a storm of fire. Tuuran staggered away, overwhelmed by noise and light and the heat. So much for our passage back. The golems pressed forward. He saw a sword-slave picked up and ripped in two, another hit by a club so hard that it took his head off his shoulders, a third batted out to sea like a ball in a game of circle-running.
A Taiytakei pushed past him and ran right in among the golems. He was clutching one of their black rods. Every golem he touched immediately froze. The work of a few moments and they were like statues. When he was done, the Taiytakei grabbed Tuuran, pushing him away from the sea and into the lee of a low stone wall. ‘Move, slave! Get away from the shore!’ He was looking up. When Tuuran followed his gaze, he saw glasships floating down from the upper parts of the city. They didn't carry golden eggs beneath them this time; instead it seemed they had great balls of fire.
‘Up there!’ The Taiytakei pointed across the sea to the abyss between the two islands and the bridge that crossed it. ‘Take your men and lead them up there. Across the Bridge of Eternity to the Eye of the Sea Goddess and keep going up. To the Kraitu's Bones! Keep away from open spaces. The glasships are coming. Sail! Fight! Freedom! No quarter!’ He slapped Tuuran's shoulder.
‘I don't have any. .’ I don't have any men he wanted to say, but the Taiytakei had already run off. For another moment Tuuran looked at the islands and the bridge between them. There? We have to get there? They'll bring it down and we'll never get across. But then again that was where the palace was, and palaces meant the best looting. He grinned to himself and looked about for Crazy Mad and then remembered another thing the Taiytakei had said.
Glasships.
They were closer and lower now, and the golden rim of the nearest was glowing. Further out to sea more were coming from the top of the Kraitu's Bones. They were too far away to see clearly but with the sun behind them they were like little stars, six of them, then seven, then eight.
The rims of the ones floating in from the upper city glowed brighter and brighter, a searing light almost beyond white with the slightest taint of blue. The unbearable brilliance of lightning. His skin prickled. His hair tinged. Lightning cannon. .
Shit!
The air exploded. Tuuran fell to his knees, clutching his ears. He couldn't hear any more. He could barely see. Half the docks were simply gone. Smoke rose from the golems, the ones that hadn't been blown apart. The sword-slaves who'd been in the open were all gone too, vanished utterly. Maybe some had followed him to shelter before the glasship fired. Maybe. The next glasship was starting to glow. He crouched down, huddled against a wall, curled up tight in a ball, hands over his ears and covering his face. The thunderclap ripped right through him. It came at him through the ground; it came at him through the wall, tipping him sideways and sending him sprawling; it came at him through his ears, leaving them screaming, and through his bones to pick him up from the inside and shake him as though he was made of rags.
This. . is not. . how it will end. I am Adamantine!
Another thunderclap. A burning ship exploded into splinters. Pieces of wood and crumbs of stone showered around him. The wall thumped him. There was a noise that wasn't quite the roaring aftermath of thunder. He staggered to his feet.
A voice. He turned and there was Crazy Mad, blinking rapidly, mouth agape, staring up at the sky, pointing and mumbling.
‘What?’ Tuuran could barely hear his own shout. Pointing at the glasships? Seen those already, you daft bastard!
‘Loud!’ bellowed Crazy Mad. He grinned the grin of a madman lost to the mania that drove him. ‘Look!’ And did his eyes gleam with a touch of silver or was that just the fire and the lightning and Tuuran's own frayed edges? Crazy was pointing up towards the glasships.
Tuuran shrugged him off. ‘We've got to run. No time for your shit!’
‘Run where?’
‘Where? Away, you dumb slave. Anywhere.’ A thunderclap almost threw him off his feet as another ship exploded. He pulled at Crazy Mad, hauling him away from the docks, but Crazy was dragging him a different way. He was still pointing up at the glasships. ‘Look! Holy sun! What in Xibaiya is that?’
Tuuran didn't want to look. Looking at the glasships made him feel small and helpless, but something in Crazy Mad's voice made him do it anyway. Behind and above the glasships he caught a glimpse of something much faster, something with wings and fangs and claws and fire coming down on them from above, but that couldn't be right because the Taiytakei didn't have dragons; and then he couldn't be sure of anything any more because the nearest of the glasships had almost reached the docks, and the burning globe of fire that hung beneath it began to fall, and he couldn't do anything but watch it come down towards them.