The time would come when this doomed venture turned sour, and even Che would have to admit defeat. Until then Thalric would play her game and hunt for a battlefield on which the Worm could be even mildly inconvenienced.
There had been tactical exercises when he had graduated from sergeant, about pitting an inferior force against one larger, swifter, more skilled. None of them had been quite this hopeless.
Light had been the first problem. Most of the native combatants on both sides could see in the dark. He himself could not, and a blind general was not someone the history books had ever had cause to sing the praises of. He had spoken at some length with Che, and then with his troops, gauging the nature of their sight. Chiefly this revealed that actual light – fires, lanterns, whatever – did not leap out at their eyes if they relied on their Art. And the same would go for the Worm, so that he had a whole chain of beacons up the route of retreat, for his eyes, and to remind the wretched slaves where they had to go.
‘They’re here! They’re here!’ A Moth woman hurtled overhead and disappeared back into darkness, and Thalric’s troops began milling and trembling.
‘Remember what I told you!’ he shouted at them, just one step away from, Do what you’re told, for they were little better than children, at war, and he had no time to explain his logic.
There were no bows in the whole extent of the under-earth, as far as he could work out. The people here did all sorts of clever things with fungus fibres and rock and coal, but there was no wood, and no substitute for it. They had no crossbows, either, and it had been something of a vertiginous revelation that they had been trapped down here since long before anyone thought of that quintessential Apt weapon.
And of course, with that whatever-it-was that the Worm did to peoples’ heads, perhaps crossbows would be no great asset anyway. Another thing that your general here doesn’t understand – and what do I recall about tactical decisions made in ignorance?
What they did have were slings, which Thalric reckoned to be surely the least efficient ranged weapon after just throwing things. He had to work with what he’d got, though.
‘I’m going to give them something to think about!’ he called out to them. ‘As soon as they’re in range, you start on them. Make every stone count.’ If you can even actually aim a sling. He was unsure about that, and he had no real grasp of their range, not in this dark place where his sense of space was hopelessly compromised.
The host of the Worm was approaching.
He let his wings carry him lightly towards them, lifting higher, hoping one of the appalling hunters of the cavernous sky didn’t choose this moment to complicate his life. His furthest fire was just casting its light on to that onrushing tide: a sinuous, weaving inroad of the Worm, the green-blue flames glinting on bronze mail and steel blades.
Neither of which they’d possess without their slaves. How can people connive at their own impotence like that? How could they even give up their own children to the bastards?
The Worm, much like Beetles and other ground-bound kinden, did not look upwards half as much as they should.
He was no strong flier, but he did not spare his sting, soaring across the face of the Worm like a stormcloud, hands crackling with fierce gold light. He had no need to aim, with that dense column rushing below him, and he just let his hands work, a dozen blasts in as many seconds, each one tearing into a target, cutting a jagged wound across the mass of the enemy.
There was no confusion: they knew him immediately, and some of them had slings, too. Not so many, though, compared to how many bodies advanced down there. He kept moving, and he guessed they did not get much practice against a flying target – if these vacant segments did anything as human as practise.
Another staccato burst from his hands, curving back above them, and of course they were not waiting for him, were still rushing towards the hapless mob of his own followers. The dozens he struck down were nothing, less than a scratch on the body of the Worm.
Then the air was alive with hornets. One clipped his foot as he pulled up, and he saw a ripple pass across the face of the enemy, the leading edge of their charging column fraying and coming apart as three score sling stones pelted into them. Those weapons he had dismissed as weak were cutting apart the front ranks of the enemy by sheer numbers.
The slaves here did not go to war, but they must hunt and defend themselves from the savage beasts that had been locked into this asylum alongside them. Slings were all they had, and the animal foes they used them against were also armoured.
Emperor’s balls! Thalric thought, seeing that initial salvo, because the entire front line of the Worm advance had just disintegrated. Surely, only around one in five or six stones had achieved anything, but there were close on a hundred slingers stacked up the raked incline where he had placed them, and they were already loosing their next shot.
Had an Imperial advance hit such unexpected resistance, then Thalric reckoned a regroup and redeploy would have been in order, but the Worm needed no such devices and simply pressed on, trampling the discarded bodies of its own fallen whether they were dead or not.
For a handful of seconds, as his own hands kept busy, he thought they might achieve something. It had seemed as though the slingshot was tearing down the Worm as swiftly as they could advance. Then reality asserted itself, and he saw that the enemy were still advancing – advancing swiftly, even – and that the attrition was insufficient to achieve anything against an enemy that had such immense numbers and no concept of personal extinction.
He let his troops loose and loose again, though, because each dead enemy surely counted for something, and then he was skimming over his own lines, calling, ‘Fall back! Fall back! Remember the way!’ The Worm were really coming on swiftly now and, as soon as the sling barrage stopped, they would become swifter.
Some of his people had already been inching away, and at Thalric’s order – or perhaps it’s my permission – the whole mob of them were scrabbling and running up the slope away from the enemy, and at least a sling was easier to run with than a bow and a quiver. He saw some of them stumble, even fall downslope, and they would certainly die, and there was nothing he was able or willing to do about it. The majority had good Art for climbing, though, and they were hurtling upslope almost as fast as the Centipede-kinden were pursuing them.
Thalric thanked his parents for giving him wings and overtook the lot of them, rising to where the rest of his force – the non-slingers – were waiting.
‘On my mark,’ he alerted them. He wondered if the insensate nature of the enemy would mean this sort of set-up would keep working, or whether the Worm would adapt to it.
It doesn’t matter. Let it work as often as you like, but we’re still pissing into the hurricane.
The Worm was beginning to catch up with the stragglers now, each wretched victim overcome in a knot of struggling figures and rising blades.
‘Go! Now!’ he shouted.
‘There are still—’ someone objected and he shouted them down.
‘They’re dead. If they’re in the way, they’re already dead.’ He dropped down and put his shoulder against one of the great rocks they had piled up here. In all honesty, he barely shifted it, but then one of the Mole Crickets followed his lead, and then others were pushing and prising and levering. And, with barely a prequel, there were tons of stone in sudden movement, descending on the body of the Worm. Some of his followers would be caught under that, but the majority were already clear. By Thalric’s book that was a considerably better outcome than they were due.