Elder Padstock’s voice came to him from close by — she was trying to shout her soldiers into some sort of order, but the Wasps were not cooperating. They were everywhere — each man operating on his own, striking and flying, keeping on the move, refusing to stand and fight. A couple of their giant insects remained, too, wings shattered and their chitin cracked by shot, but still scissoring their mandibles at every enemy within reach. Enough of the Imperials were getting in the way of the Vekken to ensure that the gates had barely been reinforced, just a few more girders fitted in place before the Ant-kinden had turned to defending themselves. In the close confines of the gateway, their shortswords claimed more of the enemy than the Collegiate snapbows, while the Maker’s Own soldiers resorted to swords of their own, trusting to their heavier armour to counterbalance their lesser skill.
The gates were crashing and shuddering under a solid rhythm now, like a bar of metal being hammered into shape by three smiths all at once. Ordinary rams would not have achieved so much, with their slow, patient battering. Of all the malevolent wonders of artifice this war had brought with it, only the Sentinels had endured to this bitter end.
We should have a gatehouse here, not just a square and a broad avenue, was Stenwold’s desperate thought. Even with soldiers on every rooftop, it should not be so easy to break into our city. But, of course, Collegium’s gates were primarily built to welcome in trade, with defence a distant second. Did we have time to change that, since the Vekken first attacked?
‘Through the Gate!’ Padstock was bellowing, sounding ludicrous really, but it was the war cry of Maker’s Own, and her men took it as the inspiration it was meant to be. Stenwold emptied his borrowed snapbow into the first Wasp he saw — missing even at this range, shooting too high in his fear of hitting his allies. Then another dozen Airborne had crashed into the group of soldiers beside him, and someone kicked him in the chest as he crouched there, bowling him over. He lost hold of the snapbow again and simply picked up a discarded sword, seeing Elder Padstock hack her blade into the neck of a Wasp, bludgeoning him down by main force rather than any attempt at fencing.
The next impact on the gates thundered through the enclosed space like a grenade explosion, carrying with it the snapping of wood and the shrieking of metal wrenched beyond its capability to resist. Stenwold stood there, unused sword in hand, and his eyes registered what the gates had become. The bracing had been uprooted by the impact, a mess of jagged-ended metal that had torn into attackers and defenders alike, and the heavy shutters backing the gate had been twisted apart, revealing the abused and splintered timber beneath, with a dozen gashes of daylight already ripped in them.
The Airborne were instantly departing, and it seemed a victory, a momentary, ridiculous victory, because it would have made more sense for them to stay and try to hold the breach so that their infantry comrades could break through. But their losses, and the anticipation that the gates were about to give way, triggered something in them that had them funnelling back into the open, braving the Collegiate shot to flee back to their own lines. The Vekken and Maker’s Own were left in sole possession of the gateway.
The ravaged gates shuddered and spasmed like dying things under the Sentinels’ leadshot barrage, but still they held, doing generations of Collegiate engineers proud. The Vekken — those that were left — formed a solid shield wall backed by cross-bowmen, a tight-packed formation five men deep, and Stenwold was shouting for them to back off, because that was the previous generation’s war, which Vek — and the Ant-kinden in general — should have discarded by now. He saw a dark face look back at him — perhaps it was even Termes — but they did not shift, instead just bracing themselves and leaving space before the gate for the ram to come through.
But when it did come through, it was far more than a ram of course. The blunt prow of the Sentinel hammered home, and this time the gates parted, wood and twisted metal slamming back against the walls and the voracious machine shouldering through, its front a map of dents and scars, but its armour intact despite that. Its eye opened and the leadshotter spoke, mounted too high for the enemy facing it, but the sheer explosive sound of it staggered them all, and the ball whistled overhead to smash into the front of a building directly across the square, punching out an extra, rough-edged window.
Then the twin rotary piercers, set lower down, opened up — or at least one of them did, the other failing to spin into life at all, a casualty of the ramming. Stenwold watched half the Vekken formation falling, the enemy’s bolts punching through shields and mail and men, chewing through their close-knit ranks like a scythe through corn. The Ants were on the move immediately, though, rushing at the machine, more of them falling to its built-in snapbows, and more still to the Wasp infantry who were pushing in at either side of the Sentinel, desperate to force the breach. Then the Sentinel itself was stepping forwards, unstoppable, inexorable, becoming both shield and hammer of the Imperial army. Snapbow bolts rattled and danced off its carapace, and the Vekken soldiers, trying to climb it and lever apart its plates with all the strength their Art gave them, were picked off without accomplishing anything, until even they were falling back, those of them that could.
Elder Padstock was calling for her soldiers to hold firm, and they held, but all Stenwold could wonder, as he chambered another bolt, was, For how long?
‘We used to do this going ship to ship, you know?’ Laszlo had explained. ‘Inapt archers, Apt toys, you see? Our artificer, Despard, she came up with a plan for putting these fellows just where we wanted them — get a bowman in the rigging and you can shoot the things onto the enemy’s deck or at his mast or whatever.’
As she listened to him, Castre Gorenn heard the usual sort of nonsense babble that people in Collegium spoke, most of which made no sense to her whatsoever. She had seen how the little artificer’s stones in his bag blazed into fire when they struck things, and then he had shown her how, with a little application, they could be tied to an arrow. She would not have listened even that far, save that the little man actually possessed a bow of his own, for all that it was a pitiful piece of work compared to hers.
‘Now, I’m going to prime this for you, so you be carefuclass="underline" put the arrow to the string, and don’t, whatever you do, knock it against anything. We want it to go bang at their end, not ours.’
Laszlo did something to the unwieldy weight that was encumbering the end of her arrow, and then something similar to his own.
‘Now we go hunting, right?’ He grinned at her, and she returned the smile, because hunting was something she did understand.
The Fly-kinden’s wings flashed, and he dropped off the wall on the city side, and she followed suit, taking exaggerated care with the deadly burden she had nocked.
Above them, the Light Airborne were beginning to return to the wall-top, not rushing it now, but shooting down with sting and snapbow, trading shot with the Company soldiers. Gorenn twitched to go back and kill more of them, but the Antspider had told her to help Laszlo and, although she resented the order, she did as she was told.
And then they dropped into the shadow of the gateway and saw the monster that was advancing through it, segment by segment, clambering over the uneven wreckage of the gate braces, and with Imperial soldiers on either side. The defenders — Maker’s Own Company and a ragged ghost of the Vekken detachment — were gradually giving ground, shooting at the soldiers but powerless to halt the terrible machine.
For a moment, Laszlo hesitated, but then he went diving in, skimming the arched ceiling of the gateway, darting close even as the Wasps realized he was there. She saw his arrow leave the string, shooting back towards the front of the Sentinel, aiming between its armour plates, and the flash and bang of the grenade fooled her into thinking he had accomplished something. The machine still ground on, though, and she tried her own shot, striking the Sentinel low down, cutting the feet from a Wasp soldier and flaring bright about the front leg of the advancing automotive. But that armour, too, seemed to be proof against Laszlo’s weaponry, and she saw nothing worse than some charring and scratches. The missile had flown like a bloated autumn beetle, almost dropping from the string, and achieving a range of a few yards at best with no real accuracy.