Then she had reached the summit, a bare ten feet below the lowest of those sparkling, murderous threads, and she finally beheld the city of the Worm.
Twelve
Bells sounded across Chasme an hour before dawn, startling hundreds of pirates, mercenaries, tinkers and whores from their beds. Nobody had heard anything like it: the alarm system had been installed by the city’s new masters but never needed before now.
Totho found Drephos standing at his high balcony, staring out to sea. All was darkness out there, barely even a moon, but the master artificer had the eyes of a Moth-kinden. Back in Imperial service he had made a practice of walking right up to the walls of besieged fortresses on moonless nights, just to get a personal look at them.
‘What’s coming?’ Totho demanded of him.
‘A fleet. At least three score ships of various sizes, with airships as well, and . . .’ A hand was lifted for quiet, and they both heard the droning buzz of flying machines.
‘I’ve all our people armed and ready: machines to go into the air and the artillery crewed,’ Totho reported. ‘But . . .’
He did not need to say it. The Iron Glove had all the technological marvels of the age, and its artificers and labourers could all don a breastplate and hit a target with a snapbow, but they were few. There was no army on the Glove’s payroll.
‘I have sent some chests of coin into the city. Those who will stand and fight will be wealthy men, if they survive,’ Drephos said.
‘Tell me,’ Totho pressed him.
The Colonel-Auxillian’s head snapped round. It was plain he knew what Totho meant, but he said nothing.
‘Why won’t you give them the Bee-killer?’
‘You think this is about the Bee-killer? You think they have roused the entire Exalsee against us for that? Have you learned nothing from history, that you think everything must have such simple causes?’
‘Tell me,’ Totho insisted.
‘I have made a mistake,’ Drephos said softly. ‘Should I have given them all they wanted? Should I have whored our last secrets, spread our legs that final span? Or would they still have come calling with their rank badge and their invitations. Do you think that they would have been happy, in the end, if I remained outside their reach?’
‘Tell me!’ Totho repeated, and at that moment the first of the Iron Glove greatshotters loosed into the darkness, the range to their targets calculated. The thunder rolled out across the lake, but Totho knew the weapons were not meant to take on moving targets like boats.
‘I did not want it to be my legacy, that is all,’ said Drephos quietly, so that Totho had to read the words forming on his lips as more engines roared and boomed, brief flashes lighting up the shanties and chimneys of Chasme. ‘It was all they spoke of, after Szar: the Bee-killer, the city-slayer, the weapon of all weapons. And it was a failure, inelegant, hard to control, easy to suborn. A bludgeon, not a blade. And it was not even mine. The Twins, those Beetles of mine, devised it, and my own input was solely the method of delivery, and even that was never used. You just piled up the canisters and set them off, like any common soldier might. So many wonderful things I have created – we have created: the ratiocinators, the new alloys, the similophone, and they would cast me in the histories as some demented alchemist.’
The fliers were launching, powering off into the pre-dawn sky. The Iron Glove had a small stable of elegant combat orthopters, and there were plenty of mercenary pilots in the city who would fight for their home – up to a point. Against them would be Imperial Spearflights, and perhaps some of the new Farsphex.
And whatever Solarno itself can launch. The city had its own pilots and machines, even if its formal air force had been destroyed in the joint Imperial–Spider invasion. Totho had heard plenty of rumours of unrest amongst the Solarnese, chafing under two yokes. If there was one issue on which they would see eye to eye with their conquerors, though, it would be Chasme.
It was still too dark to make out much, but he thought he spotted shapes out on the water. Then there were flashes answering the Iron Glove artillery, small shipboard weapons throwing explosives and scrapshot at the docks. There seemed to be precious few ships at anchor there, and Totho suspected that many had already fled rather than become an unwilling first line of defence.
‘What should we do?’ he asked. Chasme had no walls – it was a straggling mess of a place, constructed piecemeal and slipshod, half out over the water, utterly indefensible. The Iron Glove’s own stronghold could be barred against attackers but the place was a factory complex, not a fortress. It had a dozen weak points and far too few defenders.
‘Arm yourself,’ Drephos told him. ‘I see mercenary companies in place to defend the wharves, and our artillery will have more success against their vessels once they have come to rest. The air battle remains open.’ His eyes flashed defiance. ‘And we have some more toys to call on, which they have not guessed at. Arm yourself and take command of our forces. I myself shall look to the engines.’
Totho had not worn this armour for some time, but he remembered how to don it with a minimum of help. It was black and all-encompassing, its plates fluted and angled to turn away shot and blow. He took up his snapbow and strapped on a belt of little grenades, small enough to throw a fair distance, but with enough power to them to punch in the side of an automotive if he got his aim right.
With the helm on, the visible world would shrink to a narrow slot, so for the moment he left it dangling at his belt as he set out from the Iron Glove complex with a score of his followers. Their own mail was somewhat less than his: helm and breastplate of black steel over chain links so small that they flowed like water. They were veterans of a score of small actions defending the assets of the Iron Glove, and they carried repeater snapbows of Totho’s own design, an expensive luxury that had never been viable for mass export. Some toys we keep just for ourselves.
Parts of Chasme were on fire; that was what first greeted his eyes. Flames roared and leapt across a broad swathe of the docks: ships and piers and the clustered shacks there all ablaze, constricting the possible progress of the attackers.
Fly-kinden messengers sought him out, dodging and swerving through the air. After a handful of reports, he had a picture in his mind of how the fight was going. The Exalsee forces had forced beachheads at three points, with the superior aerial might of the Empire driving the defenders from cover. Two of these were locked in bloody stalemate even now, the mercenaries – and the outraged Chasme locals – preventing the attackers from pressing further in. There was a solid central thrust that had broken through the cordon and was working its way towards the Iron Glove; it seemed to be mostly made up of Wasp Airborne and Bee-kinden heavy snapbowmen under the drab banner of Dirovashni.
He gave orders with an artificer’s economy, drawing together all the forces that could be spared and setting out exactly where they should position themselves. The men at his back, his picked few, would be the anvil to meet the attackers’ hammer. We have more tricks yet.
Denied targets, the artillery was mostly still now, but the orthopter battle raged on – the sort of war the Exalsee best understood. There would be dozens of Chasme and Solarnese pilots up there who were old enemies, duelling not for anybody else’s grand plan but to resolve their own bitter grudges.