She almost fell under the Sentinel as it charged past, slamming into the next skewed carriage, sending the entire car spinning about its midpoint. She heard screams from those caught in its wake. From somewhere nearby another leadshotter boomed.
Straessa took her chance and ducked past before the machine could return, looking frantically for her people. They had formed up into approximate maniples of ten to twenty, but were keeping a lot of space between each other, which seemed good sense. Not sure why they need officers, really. They were also already shooting, using what cover the carriages and the rocky terrain gave them, and she saw Wasp Light Airborne dropping down and coursing overhead.
Another Sentinel was coming up, following the rail line, its articulated body bunching and flexing as its legs pistoned furiously. For a moment she actually raised her little sword against it, in desperate defiance, but it was already breaking off, heading almost head to head against one of its brethren. She saw that it had been painted with a long streak of black on its segmented flanks. One of ours! For the Sarnesh had a handful of the machines taken from the vanished Eighth Army, just left vacant and untouched by whatever disaster had destroyed the Imperial force.
She assumed that the two Sentinels were going to strike each other head-on. Before they got that close, though, the Sarnesh machine loosed with its leadshotter and she saw the ball skitter off the Imperial vehicle’s armour, doing no damage but deflecting its course so that, when they collided, the Sarnesh ran its prow into the flank of its enemy. Straessa flinched back from the tremendous impact, seeing both machines lurch away under it, the Imperial limping, with a couple of legs on that side trailing, and the Sarnesh brought almost to a stop by the collision, then slowly building up speed as it sought a new target.
‘Antspider!’ Gorenn dropped down beside her, an arrow ready on the string as always.
‘Report!’
‘Holding them off, Officer! There aren’t so many of their soldiers,’ the Dragonfly informed her, scanning all around. ‘Machines are fighting machines. They’ve been stopped, I think. We’re throwing them back.’
‘Was that it, then?’ Straessa frowned. ‘Just a desperate shot and then they’re spent? There must be more.’
Gorenn shrugged, but Straessa’s mind was working feverishly, starting with, Now what would I do . . .? A moment later she was darting away down the track towards the emptied carriages. There were soldiers all over – Ants forming up with silent precision, Mynans charging past with swords and snapbows – but she was looking for people who were instead keeping still, trying to be overlooked. But in such a milling crowd, stillness itself was out of place.
There . . . Curse it, I was right, and she was picking up speed, hoping Gorenn was following her. She had seen a Beetle-kinden crouching at one of the carriages still on the tracks, and no doubt the Sarnesh thought he was one of hers. He was a stranger, though, and wearing no uniform, and he was working on something at the carriage’s underside. Because if I myself was organizing this, I’d sneak a few artificers in to set some charges.
He saw her even as she was running at him, eyes wide as he realized he’d been detected. He had no snapbow, but he brought out a shortsword quickly just as she reached him, and then they were furiously steel against steel. Straessa knew she was better, but her bones and muscles were protesting the treatment with each blow, whilst the Imperial Beetle was desperate, strong and good enough to keep her at bay despite her longer blade. She tried three times to pierce through his guard, even going as far as her old trick shoulder thrust, which hurt a lot more than it had last time. She managed to pink him in the shoulder, a bare half-inch of blade, but she nearly got his own sword in her face in return, and then he tried to lunge past her point so as to grapple with her.
She got her sword into his thigh, but there it stuck, and his greater weight bowled her over, and then she was struggling with him for his own sword, as he raised it over her like a long dagger, trying to drive it down past the rim of her breastplate.
We’re in the middle of my own cursed army! Why is nobody helping me? She tried to draw breath to cry out, but she was losing ground inch by inch, and she felt that the attempted yell might see that blade plunge straight through her. His face was so close to hers that she could see the veins about the edges of his bulging eyes as he fought to kill her.
She slammed her forehead into the bridge of his nose. Or that had been the idea. In fact she slammed her forehead into his hard cheekbone, dazing herself, but he started back, losing force on the blade so that, when she pushed, she toppled him off her. With a cry, he went for her again before she could struggle upright, and an arrow skewered him almost ear to ear, leaving him sitting back on his haunches, transfixed head tilted philosophically at the sky.
‘Took your time,’ Straessa hissed, taking Gorenn’s hand and letting the Dragonfly do most of the work of pulling her up.
‘Didn’t you hear me yelling at you to give me a clear shot?’
Straessa blinked at her. ‘No . . . no, I didn’t. Look, go and round up a bunch of ours, get them to go check down all the carriages for other sods like this one, or for explosives, right? I reckon that’s going to be our best contribution for now.’
Gorenn nodded briskly, flared her wings and was away.
There were two more saboteurs caught and killed, and a dozen set explosives to disarm, but the Collegiate artificers were up to it. The Empire’s gambit had failed, on that front.
The carriage that had actually taken a leadshot hit was irreparable, and the entire army lost a day’s progress while the combined might of its artificers got the other cars back on the rails and ready to travel.
Two hundred and four Collegiates and twenty-three others had died in the attack. The work on the carriages gave their comrades time to bury them, and to mourn.
Thirty-Eight
There was one corner of the world left where Totho could think.
He was packed into this cave with the slaves, jostling shoulder to shoulder in the lightless, airless press of them. He had fought with his blade until it had been ripped from his hand. He had fought on with his gauntleted hands, but they had dragged him down. When they could not kill him, battering at his mail with their crudely forged swords, they had dragged him to their sightless city and thrown him down here with the others, those wretches who had been caught but not yet killed. The only way out was the same shaft that he had been dropped down.
Nobody was fed. Nobody was given water. Several had died already.
Totho had allowed himself to be buffeted back and forth, sometimes almost falling over save that the constant sway of bodies kept him upright, until he had found this corner, this last black outpost of understanding. A nook at the far back of the cave, as far from everything else as he could ever get.
The Worm’s deadening influence did not quite stretch there, as though it was so deep into the rock that it was thrust into some other place where sanity still reigned, and Totho could crouch there with his armour scraping against the walls, fending off the moaning, weeping mass of composite humanity, and think Apt thoughts.
Only wedged there into that corner did he have options. They had not taken his mail, so they had not taken his weapons. He had one last trick, if only he had the final courage to use it. His belt of grenades remained, and it had been easy enough to feed a single pull-cord through them all. One bold wrench and the privations of this place would be gone. He would not have to worry about them any more. He guessed that the blast would kill just about everyone else here, too. It would only be a shame that his captors would not die as well, though perhaps the contained force might crack the rock, tumble down some part of their domain into the pit that his explosives would create.