Thirty-seven Bee-kinden soldiers had reached the Mynan walls, out of almost fifteen hundred that had marched out from Szar. Many more were doubtless still alive, but scattered by the mad rout that had eventually destroyed all of their cohesion, with small parties of Bees fleeing in every direction. There would be no relief column, therefore, and the walls were about to give way.
We will sell our lives dearly, were the words that Kymene was not saying, but they were written plainly on her face whenever Stenwold looked at her. Her name and description would be known to the Imperial army, he was sure, on a list kept by some Rekef agent who would be in charge of hunting down every known Mynan leader. No doubt she planned to die well before they had a chance to capture her.
And I’ll just be an added bonus, if they get me, he considered. The two of them had spent two hours with a map of the city and a list of all the forces Myna could command, and had come to no conclusions save that, at some point, the walls would go down, and the Empire would then have the somewhat more onerous task of actually capturing the city. At that stage, Stenwold knew, the Light Airborne and their heavier ground-bound compatriots would have to get within range of whatever the Mynans could still field against them.
With his mind full of that, Taki’s dire warnings about some new sort of flying machine seemed entirely irrelevant. One crisis at a time…
‘The walls are already fallen in some parts, enough for them to get some infantry inside, if they wanted a pitched battle,’ Kymene stated, a new report in her hand. ‘We’ve done all we can to shore them up with earth and wood, to soften the impacts, but nothing is helping much. My engineers tell me that the walls are likely to suffer multiple breaches within a few hours of dusk, after which any further bombardment is unlikely to grant the Empire much more advantage in an attack. The Empire will have the choice of coming for us tonight, or tomorrow morning.’ Her voice was flat, as though this was all happening to someone else.
‘Then get some sleep,’ Stenwold suggested. He wanted to say, Why would they risk a night attack? save that nothing this army had done so far had been from the rule book he was used to. ‘Kymene…’
‘Don’t say it.’
She knew him too well, but then she was a born leader and used to reading people quickly, seeing them for what they were. He had tried several times to suggest that she had options other than dying in the teeth of the Wasp assault, and each time she had cut him off, not wanting to hear the words.
The time will come, though. Stenwold needed Kymene, because Myna needed Kymene. It had waited almost twenty years for a leader like her, after the first conquest. If she died for her city now, then Myna might languish in chains for another twenty years before anyone could free it.
Of course, the whole plan does rely on my being able to get out of the city with her. Muted by distance and depth, the crump-crump-crump of the Imperial greatshotters came to their ears still, patiently turning stretches of Mynan wall to rubble.
Stenwold managed a few hours of fitful sleep that night, before Taki was kicking at his bedroll to rouse him.
‘Wall’s down, Maker!’ she told him. ‘The Mynan foot are trying to get some sort of line together. Wasps could start for them at any moment, they say.’
Stenwold sat up, trying to place the discontinuity. They can’t have the wall down already because… the noise hasn’t stopped. The dull thump and rumble of the artillery sounded just as constant as before.
‘They’re still going,’ he pointed out.
‘But not at the walls,’ Taki said with some urgency. ‘The barrage is just creeping into the city, striking all over the place, regular as clockwork, but breaking up everywhere near the breach so they’ll have a good clear run in. Me and the Mynan pilots, we’re heading for our fliers, ’cos we reckon their Spearflights are going to come in when their Airborne and foot do and, if we’re not in the air to meet them, we’ll just get fried on the ground.’
‘Where’s-?’
‘Your woman, she’s gone to the front, trying to get her people together.’
Stenwold cursed and lurched up. He had slept fully dressed, but he hauled his artificer’s leather on over his clothes, the workman’s armour as old and battered as he himself felt. By the time he had stumbled out into the night air, Taki had already gone.
The damage to the Mynan wall was worse than he had imagined, two long stretches turned into what looked more like gravel than rubble. Some heaped masses of broken stone were now the only impediment that Myna could offer the invader, before its soldiers had to shed their own blood. The lone pillar of wall between the two gaping gashes was barely ten yards across, enough to grant a little cover to incoming enemy foot-soldiers as they closed with the city.
Even as Stenwold approached, the artillery was lighting up the night, dropping shrapnel and incendiary shells in a wide scatter across that third of Myna closest to the breach. All around him people were being evacuated from their homes, and the streets were scattered with fragments of their lives: abandoned possessions, the sundered stones of their homes, and more than one corpse.
He found Kymene supervising what siege engines she had been able to save from the wall, finding sites for them facing the breach, both on the ground and on the rooftops. She had even called up a pair of automotives, simple steam-powered vehicles with heavy armour bolted to their fronts and with the stubby barrels of smallshotters mounted on pivots atop them. All about, drawn up in loose order, were the Mynan soldiers: men and women with Kymene’s blue-grey colouring, wearing breastplates and tall helms halved in red and black. In their hands were swords, shields, crossbows and snapbows, but the enemy attacking them so methodically had given them no targets on which to take out their frustration.
‘Kymene-’ Stenwold started as he approached her.
The look she turned on him was bleak and stern. ‘We fight,’ she said, brooking no argument.
Stenwold gestured to the sword at his hip, for all the good it would do him. Then a shell landed a hundred yards from them, the sheer sound of it almost throwing them from their feet, blocking out the screams of those who had been closer. Kymene’s jaw was clenched, her hands knotted into fists. There were tears at the corners of her eyes.
‘Are they coming?’ Stenwold demanded, and she shook her head.
‘Dawn is two hours away,’ she told him, ‘but maybe they’ll come sooner. We have to be ready but…’ The punctuation of the bombardment finished her sentence for her.
Stenwold remembered the first time the Wasps had taken Myna: how terrible that had seemed, with the sky full of flying soldiers, with the gates battered down and Imperial heliopters grinding through the sky, trailing random scatterings of grenades. How little our world knew of war back then.
He found some token shelter, the shell of a house that had already been staved in, a superstitious thought saying, Surely they can’t strike twice in the same place. Inwardly, he was asking himself what he intended. He had come here as a gesture of solidarity, and now it seemed very likely that he would die in this attack — one more casualty unnamed and unremarked. The Empire would never know that they had killed their greatest detractor.
He had his sword and the little two-shot snapbow that Totho had made for him; experience had made of him a passable warrior, but it would be like spitting into the hurricane. Even with the thought, an incendiary lit up the night close by, enough for him to feel a wash of heat from it. This time the screaming was all too clear.
The Mynan soldiers kept moving, as though they could cheat the odds that way, clustering and scattering, passing on. The barrage was continuous, but spread over much of the city, and Stenwold thought that it probably claimed more non-combatants than soldiers. Beyond the rough line that Kymene had drawn up, the streets were clogged with the multitude who had become refugees in their own city.