Then he was being helped to his feet, and for a moment he could not see, and his face and shoulder were one mass of pain.
‘What’s.? Who’s.?’
‘Steady there.’ The voice was Balkus’s but there was a lot of other noise, too — the crackling of flames, the cries of the wounded. He let Balkus guide him blindly away and prop him against a wall.
‘Now hold still,’ the Ant said. People kept running past, jostling him, and he felt stabs of pain as Balkus plucked the worst of the splinters from him. He wiped his face, feeling blood slick on his hand. The injured were still being hauled from the harbourmaster’s office, even as the room burned.
‘Is everyone.?’ he started, and then realized: ‘The fleet! Is the chain up?’
‘No idea,’ Balkus said, and Stenwold staggered away, thumping down the stairs with blood seeping into his eyes again, and Balkus trying to keep up. From somewhere there was another explosion, another flaming missile from the Vekken flagship.
He staggered out into the clearer air, that was nevertheless blotched and stinking with smoke, onto the flat open quayside. Ahead of him was the calm stretch of the harbour, and the two stubby walls with their artillery towers, with the great open space of water between them.
Only it was open no longer, for the first ships of the Vekken navy were fast crowding into it. Three of the armourclads were powering forwards, and he could hear above all of it the thump of their heavy engines. To either side of them, wooden craft knifed through the water, coursing ahead of the cumbersome metal-hulled vessels, their catapults and ballistae launching up at the harbour towers.
The towers were loosing back, however and Stenwold saw one skiff swamped by a direct hit from a leadshotter, its wooden hull simply folding in the middle, the mast toppling sideways. The men that fell from its sides were armoured Vekken soldiers, as were most of the crews of the approaching navy, and Stenwold thought they must be mad to dare a sea assault.
And yet here they came, and the chain was still nowhere to be seen.
‘Raise it!’ he shouted, with no hope of being heard across that expanse of water, amongst such commotion. ‘The chain! Raise the chain!’
Beside him Balkus was slotting a magazine into his nailbow, which at this distance was as futile as Stenwold’s own shouting. By the time the weapon would mean anything, it would be too late.
And then Stenwold saw a gleam in the water as something was cranked up from the seabed: the great spiked chain that closed off the harbour mouth. There were engines three storeys high in the paired towers to drag the great weight of metal through the water, but they were engines fifty years old. Here it came, though, and Stenwold ground his teeth in agony as it seemed that the powering armourclads would be past it before it was up in place. They were bigger ships than he had thought, though, and further away, but the fleetest of the wooden vessels now surged forwards, trying to cross the barrier before it was finally raised.
The chain caught the ship before a quarter of its length had passed, and it abruptly began rising with it in a splintering of wood. The spikes on the chain were busy rotating, each set in opposition to the next one, chewing and biting into the vessel’s hull even as its bows were lifted entirely out of the water. Then the craft began to tip, spilling men out, even as its engine mindlessly pushed it further over the chain. A moment later it slid back, entirely heeling onto its side, to lie awash in the water directly in the path of the armourclads.
‘Nice work!’ Balkus exclaimed. Stenwold shook his head.
‘They didn’t even have armourclads when that chain was made. There’s no telling whether it will stop them.’
Out there, the cargo heliopter he had seen earlier was veering over the armourclads, and he saw it rock under the impact of artillery fire, half falling from the sky and then clawing its way back up. The Helleron orthopter was turning on its wingtip, and a man at its hatch was simply tipping a crateful of grenades out to scatter over ships and sea alike, exploding in bright flashes wherever they struck wood or metal. A moment later one of the flier’s flapping wings was on fire, the orthopter’s turn pitching into a dive. Stenwold looked away.
‘Master Maker!’ Stenwold turned at his name to see Joyless Greatly and a group of other Beetle-kinden lumbering towards him. They lumbered because they were wearing some sort of ugly-looking armour, great bronze blocks bolted to their chests, and man-length shields on their backs.
‘Ready for action, Master Maker.’ Greatly was grinning madly.
‘You said you had orthopters!’ Stenwold shouted at him. ‘Where are they?’
‘We’re wearing them, Master Maker.’ Joyless Greatly turned briefly, and Stenwold saw now that his back resembled a beetle’s, with curved and rigid wingcases, elytra that almost brushed the stone of the quay.
The block weighting his chest was an engine, Stenwold realized, and it must have been a real triumph of artifice to make it that small. There were explosives hanging from it, too, on quick-release catches. The expression on Greatly’s face was quite insane.
‘Good luck,’ Stenwold wished him — these being insane times.
Greatly gripped a ring on his engine and yanked at it, twice and then three times, and suddenly it shouted into life. Stenwold fell back as the wingcases on his back opened up, revealing translucent wings beneath, and then both wings and cases were powering up, first slowly but gradually threshing themselves into a blur.
And Joyless Greatly was airborne, his feet leaving the quay and, beyond him, the score of his cadre were up as well.
Beetles flew like stones, so the saying went, but Greatly had overcome both nature and Art. His wings sang through the air and sent him hurtling out across the water, utterly fearless and weaving for height, until he became just a dangling dot heading towards the oncoming bulks of the armourclads, which had reached the chain.
The sky above them was busy now, as the airfield sent out its fliers one after another to attack the encroaching fleet. Airships wobbled slowly overhead and dropped explosives and grenades or simply stones and crates, while orthopters swooped with ponderous dignity. There were fixed-wings making their rapid passes over the oblivious ships and loosing their ballistae, or with their pilots simply leaning out with crossbows. Stenwold felt his stomach lurch at the thought, but there were men and women out there, Fly-kinden mostly, but a Moth here, a Mantis there, even a clumsy Beetle-kinden, all darting with Art-given wings, shooting at the Ant sailors and soldiers and being shot at in turn. The air that Joyless Greatly and his men were entering was a frenzy of crossbow bolts and artillery, of sudden fiery explosions and scattershot.
The lead armourclad now struck the capsized wooden ship and crushed it against the chain, forcing it half-over and then shearing through the planks until it itself met the grinding teeth of the chain. They scraped and screamed as they hit the metal, scratching at it but unable to bite. For a second Stenwold thought the ship would be lifted up by it, but its draft was too deep, and its engines kept urging it forwards. Explosive bolts from the tower artillery burst about its hull in brief flares, and then one of the towers was enveloped in a firestorm as the flagship found its range. The tower was still shooting, even though some of its slit windows leaked flame.
And the armourclad strained, and for a second its stern was coming around as the chain stretched taut, but then a link parted somewhere and the chain flew apart in a shrapnel of broken metal and the armourclad’s bow leapt forwards, making the entire ship shudder.
There was now nothing between it and the harbour. Stenwold knew he should move, but he could not. He just stared at the black metal ship as its unstoppable engines thrust it forwards. The repeating ballista mounted at its bows was swivelling to launch blazing bolts at the buildings nearest. Meanwhile another missile struck the east tower and caved a section of it in.