'Will it do any good?' Faighl asked him, as one of the others ran off to spread the word. 'We're only eight, so even if the Scorpions don't get involved …'
Meyr shrugged massively, letting his pack slide off his shoulders with a scrape of metal. 'What else is there?' he asked. The thought of it was hard, that Faighl and the others would all die. He, Meyr, might also die, it seemed possible. The others would be dead for certain.
If we had only left yesterday? But he was not sure they would have been allowed to go. They had survived this long by moving as the Scorpions moved, by not raising a ripple against the current. To leave, or to be discovered in clandestine flight, would be seen only as an invitation to these violent people. It would be the excuse they were always waiting for, with outsiders, or even with their own.
He began to unpack his armour. It was a splendid suit. They had cast it for him specially to see if it could be done, to see if the principles underlying the Glove's new mail could be scaled up in size to armour-plate a giant. His spade-nailed fingers began securing buckles as big as a normal man's hand. Around him, with surreptitious professionalism, the other Iron Glove were putting on their own steel, breastplates and helms over reinforced leather. They were assembling snapbows and checking the weapons' action. Meyr himself had a shield large enough to serve the Imperial leader as a coffin lid, and an axe that put the Scorpion halberds to shame.
'Coming now,' Faighl hissed the warning.
Meyr patiently buckled his greaves, sensing his people form a rough semicircle before him, weapons at the ready. He could feel, through the parched ground, the approach of the Imperial contingent, and he reckoned on about a dozen of them. The numbers would count only at the beginning, though, as they were about to light a spark in a firepowder keg.
He stood up, rising from amongst his followers, and saw the Imperials falter for a moment, just a moment, at the sight of this great dark-armoured monster. He had become a colossus of dark steel, a machine of destruction. He now saw that there were closer to fifteen Wasps, mostly dressed in Slave Corps uniforms, of bitter memory. They were lightly armoured, with the short Imperial stabbing swords and a few crossbows, and almost all of them had one hand free: Wasps never lacked for weapons. In their centre was the halfbreed, that bastard mix of Scorpion and Empire, who now gazed up at Meyr and put a smile onto his malformed jaw.
The forces were not so very uneven, after all. The Wasps had the advantage of numbers, whereas the Iron Glove equipped its adherents with more care. Scorpions all around them had stopped to watch, eager to see some blood shed before nightfall.
The Wasps were professional soldiers, veterans of battles and skirmishes and brawls. The Iron Glove handful was a mix of mercenaries and merchants, trained but not nearly so well blooded.
Meyr took a deep breath. 'Ready bows,' he instructed.
'Behind and above!' Faighl cried out, and even as she got the words out, Meyr felt something punch into the small of his back.
He felt a brief moment of warmth as the Wasp sting boiled away off the ridges of his armour. 'Eyes front!' he bellowed, for the fight was upon them.
Two of his people went down instantly, distracted by the Wasp stings from behind and then shot from the front. There were at least three Wasps on the ground in return, lanced through with snapbow bolts that cared nothing for armour. The halfbreed leader shouted out a command and then they were moving in close with their swords.
Faighl placed her back to Meyr's, sniping up at one of the airborne Wasps and bringing him down with a single shot, trusting to the giant to guard her from the main assault. The Mole Cricket leant out over the heads of his followers, snapping his great axe forward with all the length and strength of his arm. The heavy head of it caught a Wasp slaver in the chest before the man even realized he was within Meyr's reach. Ribs snapped like sticks and his suddenly limp body was swept sideways into the next man, living and dead tumbling over in a tangle of limbs.
A couple of the Iron Glove had got their shields in place before the Wasps hit them. One was a Solarnese artificer, a hammer in his other hand making a slaver's helm ring before a sword jabbed up over the shield's rim and caught the artificer in the throat. The other shieldman was a renegade Maynesh Ant, who held firm. His shortsword never ventured forth but he danced left and right with his shield, successfully holding off three Wasps as they tried to overrun him. When they pushed him back, Meyr's thundering axe hacked into them, lopping the head clean off one man and forcing the other two to stumble back.
This will not last another minute: the unhappy knowledge came to Meyr with certainty. He had lost near half his people already. The Wasps were spreading out around them, while more were taking to the air. Flexibility and mobility had always been the Imperial way, in battle and in skirmish.
He felt Faighl die, the woman slamming against him, head rebounding from the small of his back. A moment was all he could spare to mourn her. He felt he had barely known her, although they had worked together for months. A sword-blow was turned by his legplates, a sting coursed across his shield.
The Ant-kinden before him reeled away. The halfbreed Imperial had hold of him, one clawed arm hooked over his shield. The other hand, empty, rose as if to stab down at the man's exposed face, but then fire bloomed from it, snapping the Ant's head back. Meyr roared and hacked at the enemy with his axe, but the halfbreed dived and rolled out of the way, and abruptly it was all over. They had now pulled away to form a circle out of his reach, and at his feet, Meyr saw his fellows.
The Wasps had killed them all in less than a minute. Faighl and the others, loyal servants of the Iron Glove, they had not stood a chance. Meyr glowered now at the Wasps, at their halfbreed leader. He saw more than that. He looked beyond them at the Scorpions, all lovingly fingering their spears and knives. The blood and the violence had been like food and drink to them.
With the bodies of his followers strewn at his feet, he met the gaze of the halfbreed. The man was smiling slightly, and Meyr tensed for a gesture, the smallest sign that would signal the attack.
Instead, the man grinned openly as he stepped back three paces, letting a Scorpion pass him to his left, and another to his right. All his men kept widening their half-circle, until it was the Many of Nem that Meyr faced, and not the Empire. The Scorpions all wore the same hateful smile as their half-caste cousin. Step by step they closed in on the giant, pausing just out of the reach of his axe.
So, we are weak, in their eyes. Meyr found, belatedly, that he despised them. They had signed themselves over to the Empire, and they did not even know it.
One of them hurled a spear, almost without warning. Meyr got his shield up, felt the strength of the missile rattle against the aviation steel. Something else, perhaps a hand-axe, rebounded from his pauldron, striking from behind.
They came for him then. Without a war cry, with nothing but a glitter of raised weapons, they descended like ravenous beasts.
'I spit on you all,' Meyr roared at them, and then let himself fall into the earth.
That night, around the fires, Jakal came to find Hrathen. She crouched beside him, one sharp elbow knocking aWasp slaver away and clearing a space. She did not spare the unseated man a glance.
'You are very clever, Of-the-Empire,' she began.
'Am I?' he said, carefully neutral. Her presence, suddenly so close, had fired his pulse a little. Is it that I genuinely admire her, or simply because I cannot have her? he asked himself.
'Walk with me, great conqueror,' she said, standing again. 'We will talk of your deeds.'
It is because she challenges me, he thought. She cares nothing for rank, nothing for the Empire. She is the pure savage, and she would cut my throat in a moment — will do so, when I am no longer of use.