The two of them dropped back behind the defenders, and a moment later she saw the circular hatch in the machine’s front sliding open. A colossal gout of flame and noise belched forth from it, hurling some projectile faster than her eye could follow. It smashed against the already battered front wall of a house across the way, bringing the entire building down, including with it the soldiers who had been stationed on its roof.
Laszlo had fitted another bulbous weapon to one of his stubby little shafts, but she had seen how close he had gone to get his arrow off, and how only the surprise of the Wasps had kept them from simply shooting him dead as he hovered to make the first shot.
He glanced at her, trying to mask his frustration with a weak smile. ‘This isn’t going to work, is it?’
The Sentinel lurched forwards another few feet, freeing itself entirely from the entangling wreckage of the gate. To Gorenn it was not a machine, for she knew machines. The Wasps had subjugated half her homeland with them, the noisy, stinking, clumsy things. This was something new, because no machine ever moved like that. To her, it was a living monster out of the worst of the old stories.
The Collegiates were now using the edges of the gateway for cover, driven back that far. It was all going to end soon. She had come here as the Commonweal Retaliatory Army, to fight the Wasps that had slaughtered her people in the Twelve-year War, but what had she accomplished?
‘Give it to me. Make it ready to catch fire,’ she told Laszlo.
‘Honestly, I don’t think it’s going to work-’
‘Just do it.’
The pair of them ducked out of the way as one of the Sentinel’s weapons struck stone chips from the nearby flagstones.
‘I have to get back to my ship,’ Laszlo was saying. ‘I have to find Mar’Maker. . I don’t know what I have to do.’ But he was binding another of the little fire-stones to her arrowhead. ‘Seriously, this-’
She brushed him off and, before her, its rounded prow almost fully out into the Collegium street, the great machine flexed and shook itself, settling the plates of its carapace and preparing itself for one last push.
She stepped into the air, arrow to the string, drawing back slowly, almost walking on nothing, so smooth was her ascent. Snapbow bolts spat past her, but only a few. She was nobody’s priority just then, compared to all the Apt soldiers with modern weapons that Collegium was fielding.
The monster looked at her as if it recognized the challenge. She hung in the air before its great blind face and heard the roar of its innards, felt the warmth of its engine breath wash over her.
It opened its great eye, which glared death, just like in the old stories but, knowing those stories as she did, she knew how heroes slew such monsters.
The arrow left the string without conscious thought or aim, and a thousand-year-old tradition met the most sophisticated artifice of the Iron Glove Cartel and the Wasp Empire, with a detour via the piecemeal arsenal of the Tidenfree, as she sent the grenade straight down the barrel of the Sentinel’s leadshotter.
She should have ducked away, then, but in her head she was the hero of myth, and such heroes did not shoot and run. They stood and watched the monster fall, or else they died. She was exactly in line with that killer eye, and if it spoke again, then there would not be enough left of Castre Gorenn to identify her kinden.
The grenade went off. She saw the flare and, for a moment, could not say whether this meant her triumph or her death. A moment later there was a hollow, muted thunder, and the Sentinel leapt a foot backwards, clawed metal feet skidding on the flagstones, and smoke was forcing its way out between its segments, and it was dead.
Then the Wasps began shooting at her in earnest, and Laszlo nipped past and caught hold of her ankle and hauled her out of the way, or she would surely have been killed.
‘Now! Charge them!’ came Padstock’s call. ‘Forward for Collegium! Through the Gate!’
The Wasps either side of the Sentinel braced themselves, with spears jutting forwards and snapbowmen behind, but they were packed together too closely to fight easily, and yet in a column too narrow for many of them to attack. They had been trading shot with the Collegiate archers, but as the Beetles and their allies surged forwards, Balkus pushed to the front and unloaded his nailbow into the closest batch, killing the spearmen in the front and clearing the way for the Vekken, who descended upon them with brutal efficiency. On the far side, a pair of Company soldiers followed his example with a repeating snapbow that miraculously failed to jam. Then the Maker’s Own Company rushed forwards, claiming either side of the smoking Sentinel and holding the gate.
Out there, beyond the wreckage of gate and machine, waited the Second Army in all its strength, yet still being picked apart piecemeal by the soldiers on the wall.
Stenwold claimed yet another abandoned snapbow and joined the other defenders. He could see a great many infantry out there, and now there came a brutal squad of Scorpion-kinden, the Aldanrael’s no doubt, armed with greatswords and already running full-speed as they rounded the gateway. There were pikemen amongst the Collegiate soldiers, but few of them, and it fell to the Vekken to shoulder forwards and hold the gap, shields locked and staving the huge warriors off, so that the Collegiate snapbowmen could bring them down one by one.
‘Maker!’ Balkus was shouting, pointing. Stenwold tried to peer beyond the fighting at what had caught the man’s eye. There was activity at the rear of the ruined Sentinel, but for a blurred moment he could not discern what it was.
‘They’re going to haul it out!’ Balkus yelled over the fighting. ‘We’re dead if they do!’
The engineers working there were shielded by the bulk of their dead machine. Stenwold backed off and round looked for a messenger. ‘Laszlo?’
‘Here, Mar’Maker!’ The little man presented himself smartly. ‘Got a message from the-’
‘No time,’ Stenwold snapped back. Right now it didn’t matter what the man was here for. ‘Get up to the wall, tell them to shoot anyone trying to get this wreck out of the gateway.’
Laszlo hesitated for a moment, caught in mid-errand, and then nodded and was gone, speeding out of the gateway and then straight up the wall.
The Imperial infantry was coming in again, as the last of the Scorpions fell, and now the Collegiates had the same difficulties, with those at the back unable to find a target. The Vekken shields held, though, and it was the Empire’s own hunger to take the gate that betrayed it. Had the Wasps stood off and kept shooting, the Ants would have been cut down in short order, but instead they threw themselves physically into the gap, and met the iron discipline of Vek and the marksmanship of the Merchant Companies.
Stenwold craned sideways, trying to mark the progress of the towing crew. He caught glimpses that showed him that Laszlo had passed on his orders — there was definitely shot coming from above — but flights of the Light Airborne were taking off as well, and he knew that they would tie up the soldiers on the wall.
He was so concerned with this that he missed what the other Sentinels were doing. Nobody noticed, until the Wasps on the right-hand side of the gateway fell back and scattered — by all appearances, a victory for the defenders. What was revealed, however, was the plated countenance of another of the armoured automotives, weirdly hunched so as to lower the aim of its leadshotter eye. There was barely a moment even to shout a warning before the thunderstroke of the weapon eclipsed all else, hammering into that narrow, packed corridor, obliterating the Vekken shield wall and killing a score and more of Company soldiers ranged behind them. Then the Imperial infantry were back, leading with their spears, trampling the wounded and the dying in order to claim that side of the broken Sentinel, just as the fallen machine began to scrape backwards, hauled by the efforts of its brethren.