The fight for the docks had been fierce, in the end. The Sea-kinden troops had carried the battle all the way to the Port Authority buildings in their first rush, tearing up barricades, casting down engines and killing every Wasp who was fool enough to stand still for too long. After that, the Imperials had recovered from their surprise and begun to fight back. They had a lot of light artillery mounted on roofs offering a good view of the wharves, although how they had known that an attack was coming in, nobody could say. The Sea-kinden had no fliers, and only relatively modest ranged capability. The big shock troops, the Greatclaw Onychoi, were not climbers, and many of them could not even squeeze up the buildings’ internal stairs.
They kept marching. The Imperial lines that had been drawn up to halt them were simply not physically capable of it. The Greatclaw warriors in their formidable armour shrugged off snapbow shot and ignored the Wasps’ stings and swords alike. Spears splintered from the plates of their carapaces as they struck about them with their curved swords of weighted bronze, or with the claws of their armour and their Art. Each rooftop emplacement became like an island as the tide came in.
Behind the Greatclaws came the others, a hurrying mass of soldiers from the sea, eyes wide at their own daring, braving the storm of snapbow shot; rushing forwards because to stand still would be to die. They were the Kerebroi and their allies, the people of Hermatyre, and for most of their lives they had believed that to set foot on the land was to die.
For many of them, that would be true, but they were paying a debt; their Edmir had asked it of them, and it was a new world.
Rosander, Nauarch of the Thousand Spines Train, didn’t care about any of that, for all that it was his people in the vanguard of the invasion. He was here with his Greatclaw warriors because there had been a plan once, to do just this, and he had never quite forgotten it. Oh, he had been shown how foolish an idea conquering the land was, but this . . . he had always wanted to know how it would have gone, and now he had been given the chance to find out.
The irony in how that chance had come about was not lost on him, but he didn’t let it slow him down.
The Wasps defended each building fiercely on all sides, shooting at the Kerebroi as they climbed the walls, fighting sword against spear to save their artillery. Once a roof was cleared – the surviving Wasps on it casting themselves into the air when it was either that or be overwhelmed – the Smallclaw came in. The little artificers of the sea had not been idle, and the diminutive Onychoi wore light armour of moulded shell and carried weapons that would be familiar to any land-kinden who had seen a snapbow. They set up their own shooting positions, their long bolts raking the Wasps on neighbouring rooftops, whilst their mechanics began examining the artillery that they had prised from the enemy’s hands.
Meanwhile, the Wasps were all over, darting about in the air like shoaling fish, in plain defiance of logic. They kept trying to break up the advancing front of the Sea-kinden wave, but their little weapons merely crackled and pattered against the stone of Rosander’s mail and that of his picked warriors who wore suits just as heavy. For the rest, reinforced shell was still good enough to fend off the worst of it. Rosander was frankly amazed that these diminutive landsmen put such stock in those little weapons, but then he hadn’t yet seen one of them who looked strong enough to wear the requisite weight of armour.
Rosander saw fierce fighting ahead – his line was getting broken up by the sheer maze of the place – and he realized that he had lost track of the shape of the battle entirely. The walls rising on every side made it worse than a weed forest for getting lost, and he saw ahead that a band of Dart-kinden had got ahead of him, engaging the Wasps with nothing but their spears. Let them die, then, was the obvious conclusion, but against that was the thought of a decent fight, because the enemy were standing their ground, having found a foe they could hold off. The enemy were still hopping about like mad things, though. They had discovered that the Darts’ spears had stinging cysts that could lash out nearly a man’s length, so they were constantly repositioning themselves, and using their little bows and that flashing Art of theirs to whittle down the Sea-kinden’s numbers.
Rosander raised his left arm and aimed along it as best he could, pitching up to catch the land-kinden as they took to the air. Pressure-driven weapons had been brought to the Sea-kinden from the land almost by accident, but the mechanics of the Hot Stations had not been slow in re-engineering and improving them. Rosander’s hand – almost lost within the great hooked mass of the gauntlet – clenched on the bar trigger, and the weapon set in his armour snapped out a handful of bolts, picking one Wasp straight from the air. Each shot was accompanied by a jet of mist as water vented from the battery, and the last bolt barely made it six feet away from him, so that he waved his stone hand in the air.
Immediately, Chenni was there, his top mechanic, clambering up to crouch on his shoulder and open up the compartments in his mail, first replacing the water battery and then feeding in more bolts.
‘You’ve got the land map?’ Rosander demanded of her. ‘You know where we are?’
‘Easily, Chief.’ With deft fingers she closed him up again and unfolded the land-kinden document, its fragile material already starting to come apart from too much damp and rough handling. ‘I reckon we’re – oh, will you look at that!’
Something new had arrived, and for a moment Rosander thought it was one of the land-kinden’s beasts, which had been strangely absent so far. Then he looked again, and saw the way its high-fronted segmented body gleamed: no animal but a machine.
‘Looks better than your ones,’ he grunted.
‘Give me a chance to take a look inside, Chief. I’ll build you one.’
The Wasps were now fleeing, and he thought the Sea-kinden warriors had driven them off, but then devices at the base of the new machine’s front spun into life and scythed the Dart-kinden down to a man, before they even knew what was going on.
‘Let’s get it,’ Rosander decided on basic principles, just as the machine seemed to notice they were there. Certainly it opened its single eye wide once it saw them.
A moment later, Rosander was knocked sideways, his knee crunching onto the flagstones.
‘Nauarch!’ and ‘Chief!’ rang in his ears, sounding oddly distant, and his warriors began helping him up.
‘Where’s the weapon? Someone go and throw it off a roof!’ he demanded, but they told him that the machine had gouted fire from its eye.
‘Chenni?’ he bellowed, in sudden fear, but she was at his elbow immediately, looking bruised but intact.
‘Javel’s dead,’ she told him. ‘Pushed his breastplate clean in.’
‘Bastard,’ Rosander decided, and began lumbering forwards with his followers in tow. By that time the thing was ready for another shot.
The slap of the leadshot knocked him flat, and his left arm was instantly numb. His head was ringing within his helm, and for a few seconds he had no idea where he was or what was going on. Then Chenni was shouting at him to get up, and that sounded like a good idea, and he was lurching to his feet, his bannermen streaming on either side towards the offending machine. His shoulder armour had been struck square on; had it been just stone, it would have cracked down the middle and taken his arm with it. His people knew what they were doing when they built armour, though. They knew that it had to allow some give, to take in the shock of a blow without passing that force straight through to the wearer. There were hollow cells like coral forming lines that dispersed the impact away and, as they laid down the stone, layer by layer, they interleaved wires of the new Hot Stations steel in a branching network that strengthened and reinforced. Now his broad pauldron had shattered into a hundred pieces, but all those pieces were still bound together and holding.