‘Oh, well, this is just wonderful.’ Ercusides’ tone indicated that, no, it wasn’t. ‘I left Baharna in the first place to get some peace and quiet. Sold my tower, and came here. I knew there would be wamps, but I thought, The place was stripped of its population. Without bodies to spawn from, just how many wamps can there be, anyway? Hundreds! That’s how many! Hundreds! All that fiddling about with dreffs and sinew wood and creosote and for what? So the little bastards could pop my limbs off and cave in my skull!’
Cabal had had enough. ‘You want peace and quiet?’ he asked, then opened his bag, dropped the head inside, and closed it again. Ercusides’ complaining stopped. Cabal stood, hefting the bag to analyse its new weight, and found it acceptable. He turned to find the others looking at him with a variety of expressions, none of them admiring. ‘What?’ he asked.
‘You’ve . . . put his head in your bag,’ offered Shadrach, after some hesitation.
‘So I have,’ agreed Cabal. ‘How astute of you. Now,’ he turned his attention to Holk, ‘Sergeant, we really should be getting away from this temple now that our business here is concluded. This idiot’s wamp-killing machine . . .’ here he illustrated who ‘this idiot’ was by holding up his bag ‘. . . will certainly return. Even if it doesn’t know we’re here yet, this is familiar ground to it. We must leave before it gets bored tearing up the city looking for us and comes home.’
Given the likelihood of Cabal’s hypothesis, and the generous amounts of evidence for what they could expect if they were discovered, the general consensus was to stop being appalled at what Cabal had in his Gladstone, and to get out of the city as quickly as was safely possible.
‘Gesso,’ Holk called to one of his men, ‘you’re the quietest. Go out and scout the area around the breached wall. If it’s clear, we’ll head for the buildings over yonder. They’re close together and should give us enough cover to hide from it as we move.’
Gesso did not seem pleased to be delegated to the rank of forward guard, but he was a disciplined soldier and, besides, Holk was right: he was light on his feet and could move like a cat when necessary. They moved as a group through the fallen internal walls until they were close by the outer breach. It was indeed getting dark out there; all the stumbling around inside the temple had eaten away at the time more quickly than anyone had realised. They hid in the deepening shadows around the hole in the wall, and Holk gestured to Gesso to scout the area outside.
Gesso made to draw his sword, hesitated, as if realising how useless it would be against the man-made monster they knew was out there, then drew it anyway. If he was going to die, he could at least die with a sword in his hand. He crept close to the lintel formed by the shattered blocks and paused there, looking left and right. He scanned the visible part of the square and the buildings at its edge – the painfully distant buildings that might be their only refuge – and then moved forward, silent and graceful. He slid across the broad stone surface of the broken block like a shadow, and all those observing were in the process of being impressed when a great claw came down from above and snatched him out of sight.
‘Oh, dear God!’ cried Shadrach. Outside they heard Gesso shout in surprise, then roar with rage, and then he screamed, a high-pitched cry of mortal terror and disbelieving horror. A moment later, his arm fell on to the stone. The hand still held the sword.
‘Oh, dear God!’ cried Shadrach again, but this time it was more like a sob. ‘What shall we do? Whatever shall we do?’
Cabal slapped him hard. Perhaps harder than necessary, but he felt he deserved a little recreation. ‘You can stop blubbering like a child for a beginning, Shadrach,’ he snapped. ‘Sergeant, my analysis is that if we stay here, we shall all suffer the same fate . . .’ a leg fell wetly on to the square a hundred metres away, a long trail of blood splashing down after it ‘. . . as Gesso. Agreed?’
‘Aye, Master Cabal,’ said Holk. ‘It’s a desperate business, and we won’t all make it.’
‘What?’ said Bose. ‘What? What is he talking about? What are you talking about, Sergeant?’
‘He means,’ said Cabal, slinging his bag on to his back with the aid of a black sash he had bought in Baharna for exactly this purpose, ‘that some of us are going to die when we run for it. We must move now, while that thing is absorbed in dismembering Gesso. Get out there and scatter. Head for the buildings as quickly as you can. Well? Come on!’
He drew his sword, and rushed at the breach.
Chapter 10
IN WHICH THERE IS A BATTLE AND CABAL MAKES IT QUICK
As with many aspects of Cabal’s life, charging at a great monster that has been specifically designed to kill other monsters looked, to the untrained eye, like arrant suicide. Johannes Cabal, though, was a man who lived a life of calculated risk. He knew, more or less, what he was up against, and he appreciated that, while the wamps were dangerous foes, they were not great tactical thinkers. Holk had been impressed by their ability to organise an ambush, but ambush predators are hardly unknown even in the waking world.
Ercusides, for all his many and varied failings, had created a device for efficiently wiping out the city’s wamp infestation, and he had based his plan on the wamps’ observed behaviours. They were cunning, but no more cunning than a fox, and foxes were regularly exterminated by fleets of horse and hound marshalled by folk with the collective wit of an umbrella stand. Wamps had three modes: hide; attack; flee. They only used the first as part of an ambush since, being towards the top of the food chain, they had no natural predators; its use as a defensive tactic escaped them. The second was the default, but so simple had they previously found killing that it lacked flexibility. Cabal had no doubt that the wamps’ nemesis carried scratches and bites about its feet, shins and claws, but this was the equivalent of trying to defeat a sequoia with one’s teeth, when one is not a beaver and when the sequoia is intent on tearing your legs off. Orphaned limbs scattered about the dead city gave mute witness to the futility of that. Finally, there was fleeing, but the nine legs of a wamp were there to allow easy climbing and not sustained running beyond that required to bring down escaping prey. Soon those nine legs would grow tired, unlike the long-striding doom bearing down upon them.
Therefore, Cabal had decided that fleeing was pointless, and hiding would only delay the inevitable. Instead he would apply himself to the attack, the exact nature of which he would evolve on sighting the colossus.
His forward foot coming to rest on the leading edge of the broken wall, he jumped down, landed on the ground running and jinked left, the direction he guessed the colossus to be standing, based on the angle of the claw’s descent when it had taken Gesso, and the subsequent observed trajectories of his limbs. In this he was proved correct, almost running into a leg the thickness of a tree trunk, largely because it
