Totho found himself crouching against some of the fallen wall, frantically slotting another magazine in place and knowing he was almost out of ammunition. Skrill was behind him, her back to his, sending sporadic arrows up at the enemy. More and more Ants were coming to help hold the breach, and even Totho could see how the attacking force was being made to give ground, every inch of it bought in blood. Above them the cavalry had arrived, Ant-kinden soldiers riding great winged insects, cumbersome in flight as they buzzed ponderously through the darting Wasp airborne. Each flying beast had a big repeating crossbow mounted above its thorax and soon the newcomers were taking a savage toll of the enemy.
Knowing that Salma was up there somewhere, Totho just hoped he would be safe, but he could spare him no further thought.
Yet more Ant-kinden were coming to join the defence. Some had brought packs of giant ants under leash, drawn from the nest of tunnels beneath the city. The creatures were the guards and soldiers of the nest below, and another resource the city could barely spare, but they had stings and jagged mandibles. As soon as they were within sight of the enemy their leashes were loosed, and they scuttled towards the foe with jaws gaping in idiot threat.
Totho tried to track another Wasp soldier while the man darted overhead, hands spitting golden fire. Then one of the Wasp heliopters rumbled past, and Totho noticed it was failing, one of its rotors torn and still. The ponderous, blocky machine limped through the air, tilting and tilting further. One of the great flying insects was clinging to its side, riderless, peeling at the metal casing with its jaws. Then it went out of sight over the rooftops, but Totho felt it come down, felt the ground shake and heard the sudden blast as its engine ruptured and its fuel exploded. Looking over the rooftops he saw the night was punctuated by a dozen red gleams where Tark was burning.
There was a sudden sense of movement around him, Ants pushing into him, wordless but eyes wide as some unheard alarm went through their heads.
A bright light, a sound — he was lifted up by a great hand. He heard Skrill scream and then. and then. Nothing.
*
Totho’s head was ringing, and he did not know why. He was aware of lying on some uneven surface and there seemed to be a great deal of noise and confusion going on. He sat up, clutching his head, and then saw what he was lying on.
Bodies.
He was lying on corpses, dead Ant-kinden from Tark, dead Wasp-kinden from the Empire. He stumbled to his feet, fell over almost immediately. His artificer’s coat was bloody and ragged, and he picked a metal shard from it curiously. All around him a lot of people were rushing back and forth, but he felt it was his duty as an artificer to identify the piece of metal he had found.
It looked like the sort of fragment that would be left behind by an exploding grenade, he thought. A crude ball-type grenade, not one of the hatched-metal ones the Beetles made in Helleron.
Awareness ran through him like a swordblade: Tark; the siege; the night attack. It was still going on. He must have been knocked flat by an explosion.
‘Skrill?’ he shouted, remembering how she had been there with him. ‘Skrill?’ but there was absolutely no chance of being heard. Even his own voice sounded muted and far away. Another thirty or forty Ant soldiers went charging past, trampling their own dead. Some stopped to shoot upwards, and he fell to his knees once again, looking into that asylum sky full of fighting men, beasts and machines.
Hands found him and helped him to his feet. He leant back into them, feeling shaken and sick, the impact of the grenade still thundering in his head.
‘Che!’ he got out. ‘You found me.’
‘You better get your head on straight!’ And Che turned into Skrill, her voice high with fear. ‘Where’s your piece?’
He looked around, but Scuto’s marvellous crossbow was now nowhere to be seen. He plucked another — a Tarkesh soldier’s — from its dead owner’s hand, dragging a quiver off a second body.
They had moved further from the breach, he saw, but the gate itself was now open. Or rather there were splintered pieces of it left barely clinging to the hinges. There was the great engine there that had powered through the gateway before it had finally been stopped and disabled. Ants and Wasps were fighting there. Totho stumbled towards the machine.
‘Where’re you going?’ Skrill shouted after him. She had lost her bow, he noticed. She should find herself a crossbow as he had, but of course she surely derived from some primitive old race that didn’t know about crossbows and how clever they were.
The ramming engine was partly blocking the gateway. Wasp spearmen were trying to push through, but the Ants were holding them back. The engine itself looked really interesting, though, and that seemed the most important thing to Totho’s addled mind. As the Ants swarmed around it, he struggled to make his way to its battered head. It had not been intended for this use, he now saw. Some brilliant hand had cunningly reshaped it.
There was a litter of bodies about it, mostly Wasp-kinden. Some were still moving, and he eyed them dully. The engine was slewed a little on its side, and he saw corpses in Wasp colours scattered there, but not actually Wasps. Artificers? Of course they were the machine’s artificers. The Wasps themselves had no respect for such skills.
He reached out and, as the Ants continued fighting all around him, he put his back to the skewed machine and forced it up, working to free one of his brother artificers from under its weight.
Skrill was yelling again, and he glanced around in time to see the city wall by the gate begin to shift. He suddenly felt so very calm about it, because he was right in the wall’s shadow, and there was nothing he could do about it in time.
Stones began to bulge out of it, only one at first, and then in whole fistfuls. A man emerged: Totho could see his shape by the light of the fires, but it seemed impossible, for it was a man ten feet tall, armoured in great metal plates and wielding an eight-foot mattock. There were others behind him, and they lumbered out of the gap as still more Ants rushed in to engage them. Just before they clashed Totho was struck by the expression of hopeless misery on those giants’ faces.
The huge creature in the lead swept his spade-headed spear around him like a club, flinging three or four of the Ants aside with ruined shields, but then the soldiers were on him, and their attack-insects as well. Totho watched with numb amazement, seeing how easily the giants fell. There were Wasps following behind them though, armoured Sentinels pressing forward, their plate-mail easily turning the swords of the defenders. Some dozen of them plunged into the Ant line and shattered it, even as the last giant fell, and then there were savages bursting out along with them, shrieking and casting their spears. Behind them, in turn, came the armoured Wasp infantry, already lancing out with its stings.
Totho felt the fallen man he held stir in his arms and he forced the ruined engine an inch further off him. The man clutched at him as Totho pulled him free, now seeing the wreckage the fallen engine had made of his legs.
With conflict still all about him he dragged the dying man away, aware only that this was an artificer, and therefore a brother in craft.
‘My queen!’ the man cried. ‘I am done at last.’
Totho lowered him to the ground. He felt cold and getting colder, but his eyes found Totho’s. ‘You, Lowlander. I am sorry-’
Totho nodded, not knowing what to say. The man’s hands tugged at his coat, and perhaps there was some returning recognition there, on feeling the pockets lined with tools. ‘You must know. the air. airships! It is the end. I have. died for them, never to be home again. But the airships. you must guard.!’