The Scarab Path

Amnon vaulted up to take the centre, of course, his shield on his arm and his spear drawn back. To either side of him were the pick of his Royal Guard, men and women in scaled hauberks, with their elliptical shields and long spears. They were braced, and Totho could hear the thunder of the Scorpions, the roar of their battle cries, as they rushed up the facing slope of the bridge.

Rush on, he thought, and welcome to the modern age.

He did not even have to look. The first screams each denoted a caltrop for him, and he imagined the charge stumbling over itself, warriors trying desperately to stop, feet run through with agony, while being shoved from behind by their heedless fellows. The archers were busy, methodical and unchallenged, as they emptied their quivers into the enemy. There were always more arrows.

Totho clambered up, not too proud to take the offer of a helping hand. The Scorpions were already in retreat, leaving a great bank of their dead that was still yards short — spike-studded yards short — of the barricade. The archers continued to let fly, sending their arrows over the arch of the bridge on to the fleeing host, heedless of individual targets.

The second and third Scorpion advances were desultory. They came without enthusiasm, barely got within the sight of the archers before they were falling back in a scattered and dispirited rabble. The Khanaphir cheered as their opponents disappeared back beyond the curve of the bridge.

'We can't have broken them,' Amnon stated, stepping down from the breach. He had not yet bloodied his spear. 'They are stronger than that.'

'They're preparing something,' Totho said. He leant back against the stones, feeling their reassuring solidity against his backplate. 'They've got a plan. This is just to keep them busy while they work it up.' He glanced at Amnon, but the man's open, honest face was now a metal carapace, just a dark slot for the eyes.

We look evil in these helms. It was a child's gleeful thought. He imagined the Scorpions seeing Amnon the deathbringer, the black-armoured warlord at the centre of the line. It must give them pause, he thought. It must shake them. The sight was worth a fistful of caltrops, at the very least.

There was a call from the barricades and Amnon stepped back up. A moment later he shouted, 'This is it!'

Totho scrabbled at the stones hurriedly, using his Art to clamber up to the archery platform. What he saw from there wrenched his stomach.

Oh Che, he thought, with a fervent hope that she never learned about this small stratagem.

The Scorpions again crested the bridge's arc, and this time they had brought company. Ahead of their line, herded forward by spears and halberd-points, were perhaps two score Khanaphir, prisoners who had so far escaped torture or butchery. Some were children. Totho glanced at the archers around him, with their strings drawn back, and saw faces abruptly torn with shock.

Shoot them, Totho thought. Shoot them and save the caltrops for the enemy. He opened his mouth, looking to see if Amnon would give the command. Shoot them! Do not even think to break ranks and let them through. The lines of spears, Amnon and his Royal Guard, all held fast but no orders came.

Bowstrings twanged. It was the Mantis-kinden, drawing and loosing with casual speed, between the prisoners and over them. Totho did not know whether they were confident of their aim or heedless of the consequences. Still, the Scorpions were slowed by their own trick. Each arrow brought a death, winging from over the wooden parapet to plunge through Scorpion mail, through flesh. There were only a dozen Mantids at the wall, though, and the Khanaphir archers still held back, arms trembling and teeth bared.

'Loose!' bellowed Amnon, and Totho wondered whether he had simply not seen the problem, with his vision limited to that unfamiliar slot. Even with his orders, most of the archers did not shoot. Those that did pitched their arrows high, trying to curve down on the Scorpion rear ranks. The advance was now at the bank of bodies that the first wave of attack had left behind.

A great roar went up from the Many of Nem, not just the warriors on the bridge but the whole host on the west bank, and they pushed forward. The rearmost of the prisoners went down at once, lanced through by spears, hacked by axes. The rest fled.

Totho braced himself for it, but it was brutal. As tactics went, it had a clever simplicity that Drephos would have approved of. The prisoners fled towards their fellow citizens, heedless of the spears, but it was not the spears that took them. They plunged on to that unplumbed no-man's-land, and screamed and fell and clambered over each other, and fell again, lanced through by the caltrops. Totho felt the defenders shudder, saw the spearpoints ripple as the soldiers fought against their own instincts. They were an inch away from breaking forward to recover the fallen.

'Hold!' he shouted, and who cared that he was in no position to give orders. 'Hold and ready!' he commanded, just like a real battlefield officer, like a Wasp captain who had only his voice to keep his unruly soldiers in line.

Oh, if only artifice could give us the Ants' mindlink.

But they held. It was their discipline or Amnon's steady presence, or even Totho's exhortation, but they held. There were tears in some eyes, and hands shook. The Scorpions were coming.

They enacted a savage mercy upon the fallen as they came, stamping and hacking at them, working themselves into a greater frenzy. Arrows, long restrained, punched into them, but they were at the barricades now, and the dead Khanaphir were a few extra inches of height to assault the spears.

Still, it was fully four feet of stone and a wooden lip, and a fence of spears beyond. The Scorpion assault broke against those defences. Lean, tall men and women, like fanged and clawed monsters, were run through a dozen times as they leapt up like madmen. They fell back, pulling the spears along with them, as they died faster than new lances could be passed from the back. Halberd blades cracked shields, even split the wood of the barricades. The shock of that first impact whiplashed back through the Scorpion lines, but it did not stop them. This time they kept coming.

Totho fitted a magazine to his snapbow, the model he had made with his own hands, and set to work. As the archers either side of him fitted their arrows, drew back and let fly, he directed the weapon into the enemy and depressed the trigger, feeling the minute kick, the explosive snap-snap-snap-snap-snap as it discharged. Five bolts, and he had remembered to swing his arm to rake this volley across the host. Otherwise he would have put them all virtually in the same target, killing one wretched Scorpion so unnecessarily dead that anatomists would have refused the body as a teaching specimen.

Totho ducked back behind the parapet and charged the battery, not lever-pumped as with the originals, but wheel-pumped for smoothness and speed. His gauntleted hands spun the little winch-handle with the ease of long familiarity, and then he was ready to empty the other half of the magazine into them.

No bloodlust required, he thought. No howling hordes, no particular strength, not even any real skill, at this close range. I have made war a province of the intellectual. Snap-snap-snap-snap-snap, the finger-sized bolts punching through armoured men, sometimes two or even three at a time, unstoppable. They had no idea what was killing them, and most of them were dead on impact, a narrow hole drilled through chest or skull becoming a fist-sized gob of gore by the time it made its exit. He took another magazine and clicked it into place with his thumb, forcing the old one out into his waiting hand.

I did well, when I made these.

Something struck him in the chest, and he was abruptly airborne, flying for a moment before he struck the side of the bridge hard enough to hammer the breath from him. The armour saved him from broken bones, but for a moment he just lay there, unable to understand what had happened. He levered his helmet back, craning to look down. There was a dent and a long scar across his mail, and his professional understanding supplied: crossbow bolt.

He looked up just as one of Amnon's people was punched backwards, the short end of another bolt lodged in his throat. Shields were being raised along the line, and he saw how the archers had pitched their aim higher, shooting further. Totho levered himself to his feet, feeling the pain of a body-length bruise. Despite it, he levered himself onto the barricade again, to get a look over the parapet.

There was a line of crossbowmen up on the very apex of the bridge, not shooting all together but each man intent on dragging the string back and loosing as swiftly as he could. Before them stood a rank of Scorpion-kinden