All the while, the greatshotters continued their determined work.
The Sarnesh had brought a flight of orthopters, old Collegium designs and the products of the Ants’ own artificers, workmanlike but unimaginative vessels, mostly still equipped with the repeating ballistae of yesterday’s air forces. The Spearflights outnumbered them more than two to one, but the first day of aerial duelling was not won easily nonetheless, the Ant pilots selling each broken machine dearly, taking a toll on the enemy despite the shortcomings of their technology. At the same time the Sarnesh ground forces advanced the long march towards the Imperial lines, rank upon rank of armoured Ant-kinden armed with shield, sword and snapbow, backed by the trundling of tracked automotives.
The traditional Imperial response should have been to send the Light Airborne out en masse, coursing over the marching formations to lash down on them with their stings — tactics that had failed miserably in living memory. Instead, Roder held the bulk of his force in place, taking full advantage of the cover they had built up.
The automotives formed the initial point of their charge, grinding forwards at the pace of a man running. They met the Imperial Sentinels coming the other way. The articulated machines fairly vaulted the Wasp earthworks, rushing the Ant lines with bolts and light artillery bounding from their shells, only pausing with legs braced to loose a leadshotter round that ploughed through the Ant soldiers or punched into the armour of a Sarnesh automotive. Faster and more agile and vastly better armoured, as the battle progressed they hunted down the Sarnesh machines mercilessly, crushing any soldier luckless enough to get in their way.
When the Ants got within snapbow range they mounted their charge, breaking their solid formations into a scattered skirmish line to best avoid the incoming bolts. It was at that moment that they came closest to winning, had they only known.
The snapbows and the leadshotters tore into them, scattered or not. The Ants were still trusting to their heavy armour that would carry the day if they could only get into the close combat that they were so skilled at, but it weighed them down, and it did little to slow the incoming shot, despite the silk and felt they had lined it with.
Once the Ants were committed to their charge, Roder sent detachments of Light Airborne out — not over the enemy, where they might be picked off, but in solid groups landing to the left or right flank, shooting directly into the sides of the enemy formations.
The Ant-kinden tacticians knew all this, of course. They were able to send detachments left and right to chase off the flanking forces, although the Wasps always came down out of reach, shooting even as they landed. They were able to exhort their soldiers onwards into the flaying lash of the massed snapbows, in the knowledge that, if they could only gain the first earthworks, the Empire’s soldiers would surely fold, and the Ant infantry could rush through and reach the incessant greatshotters behind. By then, though, some of the last surviving Sarnesh pilots had relayed their views of the Wasp camp: trench on bank on trench, no fit terrain for armoured soldiers to clamber over into the barrels of snapbows. And, of course, the Wasp Airborne would be able to hop from trench to trench with ease.
There was a moment, a fulcrum moment, when the casualties mounted to such a level, within mere yards of the first earthworks, that even the tacticians suffered a crisis of faith. The cost was too great. Hearts as solid and dutiful as iron broke in that same moment. They felt every death, and it was too much.
They tried again over the next few days, sometimes with reinforcements, sometimes with new orthopters, but they never came as close as on that first day. The knowledge of what awaited them blunted each successive attack, never quite able to grasp the nettle now they had felt its sting. Meanwhile, the Wasps made the best use of their undisputed ownership of the sky to send their Spearflights, and even some airships, out to bomb the Sarnesh camp and to bedevil any advance.
On the twelfth day, even as another attack was aborted before it even reached snapbow range, the inner walls of Malkan’s Folly suddenly caved in, changing from impregnable fortress to stone eggshell in a minute of cracking and dust. It was enough. The Sarnesh army fell back, and continued falling back because the greatshotter artillerists were already gambling with new calculations, trying to chase them back towards Sarn.
As one of the younger armies, the Eighth had not yet earned a name for itself but, with the fortress fallen and the Ants in full retreat, Roder put out the word. From now on, the glorious Eighth Army would be ‘the Hammer’, just as Tynan’s Second was ‘the Gears’ and the fallen Seventh that Malkan had commanded — that Roder had now avenged — had earned the name of ‘the Winged Furies’.
The men of the Eighth were ecstatic, and Roder let them celebrate because he did not want them thinking too much about what was to come. The game only got harder, the further west they marched. Partly this was because of supply lines. Partly it was that, the closer they got to Sarn, the more the Ant-kinden themselves could complicate a day’s travel. Mostly, however, it was the great brooding mass of trees that would shortly eclipse their northern horizon.
This was the joke, the limitation of the Sarnesh tactical view on the world. Ant-kinden were self-sufficient, in this case actually to a fault. Their great fortress, in which they had placed so much faith, was the least of Roder’s worries, for the land beyond it was guarded by a threat he took far more seriously: the Mantis-kinden.
In the last war, the Mantids of the Felyal, on the southern coast, had essentially destroyed the Imperial Fourth Army, and when General Tynan had marched that way with his Second, he had taken a great many precautions to ensure that history did not repeat itself. His advance had been slowed by the need to fortify every night, until he actually got the Mantids where he wanted them, killed their warriors and burned their forest.
The Etheryon was the largest single forest north of the Alim, containing two separate Mantis holds and a population several times that of the Felyal, and all of them killers by nature who could walk as silently as the breeze and see in the dark. Roder had dealt with his fill of assassins when he had fought the Spiders at Seldis, but it was a matter of recent record that enough Mantis-kinden could assassinate an entire army. It was going to be a long road to Sarn, and that was even before he considered the surprise the Ants themselves had managed to leave for him.
After the fortress fell, the Sarnesh relief force had quit the field, but the defenders of Malkan’s Folly had not. Those who had survived — an uncertain number, and Roder had no way of finding out just how many — were still there because, of course, the Ants had undermined their own creation with cellars and tunnels and subterranean barracks, and probably a living ant-colony as well, full of vicious three-foot biting insects ready to scuttle to their masters’ bidding. The fortress had fallen, but its architects had the last laugh: it still fulfilled its function as a threat that Roder was unwilling to leave at his back. For all he knew, those tunnels could run all the way to Sarn itself.
He had conferred with Ferric on whether sustained greatshotter bombardment could cave the earth in on the whole nest of them, but the engineer was not optimistic, and the idea of sending troops into those tunnels to try and root an unknown number of Ants, quite possibly many hundreds of the tenacious bastards, was not appealing as a use of either time or materiel. Ants couldn’t see in the dark, but their mindlink would give them a good enough picture of their surroundings, built up from a consensus of sound and touch and shared proximity.