The Iron Wyrm Affair

aha! Eat that fine dinner, sir!

Were Clare to explain this battle, he would liken it to a game of chess – except with a dozen boards, each board in five dimensions, and each player with as many pieces as he could mentally support without fusing his brain into a useless heap of porridge.

There was, unfortunately, no time for comparison or explanation. He pushed the dozen mecha forward, a tiny piece of grit edging under Londinium’s shell, metal creaking as he leaned forward, his body tensing inside the straps. Gears whined and ratcheted, fountains of sparks showering the paving of Kent Road.

Shimmering curtains of equations spun and parted, the world merely interlocking fields of force and reaction. For a moment the whole of the city spread below him, nodes and intersections, and he saw the thrust of the other mentath’s attack.

St Jemes’s Park lay littered with smoking mecha corpses. But there was an endless array of them, pressing north towards the Palace. Further clusters about Whithall and the Tower, and Clare had to decide which he was to strike for.

Save Victrix. Nothing else matters.

It was as if Miss Bannon stood at his ear, whispering. The pendant she had given him was quiescent, neither hot nor cold – of course, the field of an active logic engine would interfere with it somewhat. But ever afterwards, Clare thought it very likely that some quirk of Nature had spoken across time and space, telling him exactly what Emma Bannon would say. Perhaps it was only his deductive capability.

He did not think so.

The decision was already made. He quickly made the calculations, turning several of the necessary routines over to the logic engines and smaller subroutines to the glowing Prussian capacitors – their route was now fixed, pedestrians and carriages to be avoided if at all possible, the mecha not carrying himself and his companions striding ahead as pawns. Greenwitch Road, taking care to stay as far away from the edge of the Wark as was possible, then a cut through St Georgus Road; the Westminstre Bridge would be under attack but he would perhaps strike the invaders where they thought it least possible. If he could win the other side of the bridge, there was the battle at Whitehall to skirt and the park to traverse, then the Palace.

“Britannia!” he yelled, and the mecha screeched in reply, a hellish cacophony. “God and Her Majesty!” And the mecha leapt forward, just as the other mentath, its core-bloated intellect no longer resembling anything human, realised the small insect buzzing at the southeastron edge of Londinium was not smashed, and gathered itself to smite again.

“Use the cannon!” Clare bellowed, but Valentinelli had already – much to Clare’s relief – decided that such an operation would be advisable. In any case, the cry was lost in the hullabaloo. Metal shrieked, groaning, and the peculiar discharge of the mechas’ cannon – bolts of hot energy, crackling and spitting as they cleaved violated air – did not help matters. Valentinelli had torn the leather straps holding the contacts free of his mecha, as had Sigmund at some point in their wild career across Londinium. The risk of one of the metal discs inside the leather helmets touching their skin and inducing fatal feedback was too immense.

Especially as the mecha were jolting as they fired. Clare had eight remaining out of a dozen; four had been left at Westminstre – one a shattered hulk, the other three under the control of some doughty Coldwater Guards in their soot-stained, tattered crimson uniforms who had been sent to hold the Bridge against this menace. Good lads, they had ripped the contact helmets free and taken the controls of the mecha in stride.

The Bridge had been littered with bodies and the smoking remains of shattered mecha, some with intact golden cores glittering. Many of the bodies were sorcerers or witches and their Shields; since charm and spell would not work, their only alternative had been to stand and die.

The Park was a wasteland of scorch and metal, trees stripped of their leaves and blasted, the lake boiling from the weird crackling cannon bolts. Clare stopped, wheeling; his fellow mecha did the same.

Wait. They are attacking Buckingham, not St Jemes. That must be where the Queen is.

Which was a more defensible palace, to be sure, but it rather altered his plans. There was no time to explain; Clare urged the mecha forward, taking over subsidiary control from his companions. The earth quaked as their cuplike feet drummed, mud and metal shards flying. Smoke wrung tears from his stinging eyes, a minor irritant. The other mentath, behind his massive logic engine, had ceased seeking to swat at Clare as if he were a horsefly. Instead, the stirred-hive mass of mecha were running together like sharp metal raindrops on a window pane. Clare could feel them, a painful abscess beneath the skin of Londinium. The city quivered, a patient under the tooth-charmer’s touch.

Force of numbers would drown what a battering of logic could not. The other mentath’s intellect was a smeared explosion of living light, diseased and overgrown, swelling hot and painful in the mindscape of the glowing engines.

Mud sucked at the cuplike feet, the Park thrashed out of all recognition. The Palace lifted its brownstone shoulders, shattered windows gaping and bits of its masonry crumbling as the huge arachnoid mecha squatted, its spinneret cannon ready to fire. Squealing wraithlike howls, the ghost-snarled brains trapped in their sloshing jars atop the spider bubbling and struggling for release, their screams a chorus of the damned as the other mentath used them ruthlessly to amplify his own force.

“ONWARD!” Clare roared, releasing Sig and Valentinelli’s mecha. It wasn’t quite proper to force them into the charge, and in any case, he had more than enough to do with his remaining five passengerless mecha so near the immense core and engine burning in the arachnid’s abdomen. Capacitors glowing, its eight feet stamping in turn, the gigantic thing braced itself as the spinneret cannon began to glow. The Other – for so Clare had christened the opposing mentath – woke to the danger a fraction of a second too late, and Clare’s five mecha hurled themselves on the massive arachnid with futile, fiery abandon. Metal tore, screaming, Prussian capacitors shattering and overloaded cores howling at the abuse, and the Other engaged Clare with a burst of pure logic.

Chapter Thirty-Six An Awakening

It was not the weakness in her limbs, Emma decided. The ground itself was quivering steadily, like a pudding’s surface when the dish is jostled. Which was disconcerting, yes, but not nearly as disconcerting as the sounds from above.

Clacking razor beaks, the tearing-metal and crunching-bone cries of gryphons, hoarse male shouts, and a swelling sorcerous chant that ripped at her ears and non-physical senses. It was a complex, multilayered chant, a prepared Work of the sort that took months if not years to build. Consonants strained against long whistle- punctuated vowels and strange clicking noises, as if the peculiar personal language of the sorcerer had been married to an older, lipless, scaled tongue of dry fire and sun-basking slowness.

An Awakening chant, of course. She hauled herself up grimly, boots slipping on dew-wet rocks, vines tearing under her hands. The trick, she had discovered, was to push as hard as she could with her legs, silently cursing the extraneous material of her skirts. A minor charm to keep the skin on her hands from becoming flayed helped, but her arms shook with exhaustion, her fingers cramping and her neck afire with pain. The dragon. Hurry, Emma.

It was a surprise to reach the top of the rocky, almost vertical slope. She hauled herself up as if topping an orchard wall in the days of her Collegia girlhood, and lay full-length and gasping for a moment, protected by a screen of heavy-leafed bushes.

Shadows wheeled overhead, their wings spread. She blinked, sunlight drawing hot water from her unprotected eyes. The shapes were massive, graceful and fluid in the air, afire with jewel-toned brilliance.

Gryphons. One, two, good heavens, six, seven – Grayson did not have this many!

It did not matter. She rolled to her side, peering through the screen of brush. Exactly nothing would be achieved if she rushed into this. The chant was rising towards consummation, its broken rhythm knitting itself together, and she blinked back more swelling water, seeking to