armour-plated and mounted with an artillery piece little short of a full leadshotter. The Sarnesh drove on, shouting his message hoarsely to everyone it could reach, and meanwhile the other four Ant-kinden machines formed up with a half-dozen Collegiate automotives, ready to meet the Sentinels, charge for charge.
‘You heard him!’ Amnon bellowed at his driver. ‘Get us moving!’ He wished this was a chariot, where he could whip at the beasts himself as need be.
The driver directed an ashen glance at him, and then at the Sarnesh and their allies, who were just moving off, even as the Sentinels’ dust rolled fast towards them. For a moment Amnon thought the man’s nerve had gone, but their artillerist yelled, ‘Come on!’ and at last the man turned their machine back towards the Wasp host, and the balance of their machines were following.
Amnon raised his sword high, just as when commanding chariots or cavalry, and the ramshackle wedge of war-adapted machines drove towards the Wasp lines, gaining speed as they went.
The Imperial artillery found them first — larger pieces with a longer range than those the Collegiates had been able to mount — and the machine to the right of Amnon exploded without warning, a leadshot landing directly on it and almost folding it in two. Ballista bolts arced overhead, exploding where they struck, leaving charred craters in the ground but striking nothing. Another automotive towards the back took a leadshot hard on one wheel and spun out of control.
There was some attempt at an infantry line ahead, a wavering wall, but they were clearing out of the way early now, orders or not. Snapbow bolts began to fall amongst the automotives, rattling off metal or driving deep into wooden panels. Behind Amnon, the artillerist woman gave a single bark of surprise, and then she was gone, pitched over the side by the force of the shot that killed her.
Amnon swung himself grimly into her place, behind the weapon, something magical and terrible by his peoples’ standards, but simple by the lights of Praeda’s instruction. His dead mistress had done her best to equip him for the world he now found himself in, and she had known he would be going to war.
He swung the weapon round to seek out enemy artillery, finding a leadshotter whose three-man crew was already tilting it to drop a shot towards the back of the automotive column. With sure hands he aimed, and absorbed the thunderous kick of the compact little killer with the great strength of his arms and shoulders. He saw one of the Wasp engineers simply explode as the ball passed through him to punch the artillery piece in the rear, spinning its barrel round to catch at least one of the other crewmen as it did so.
He fumbled with reloading, shoving another fist-sized ball down the barrel and wadding it tight, before prising out the spent firepowder cartridge and replacing it with a new one. Then he spared a glance for the battle with the Sentinels.
It was practically over, and his heart lurched just to see it. There were only three Sentinels there, those great plated mechanical woodlice with their high single-eyed prows, but the wreckage of most of the Collegiate force was strewn around them. As he watched, he saw a Sarnesh machine plough in, smoke gouting as its weapons loosed, and one of the Sentinels rocked under the impact, but no more. A moment later the larger leadshotter within a Sentinel’s body spoke out, its eye flashing fire. The side of the Sarnesh machine was staved in, its headlong charge turned into a mad circling as one set of its tracks locked. Then another Sentinel rammed it, aiming for the crumpled side, and tipped the doomed machine over, smashing the Sarnesh automotive onto its side. Amnon saw the third machine lining up carefully to send a leadshot round into the stricken machine’s unarmoured undercarriage.
His driver began shouting that something was ahead, and he swung the loaded smallshotter around, hoping to see the great enemy artillery that was their target.
There were three more Sentinels in the way and, even as he watched, smoke exploded from one open eye, and an automotive on his left flank was abruptly flung in the air, fuel tank rupturing in a brief ball of fire.
The first bomb had landed close enough for the resounding roar of it to sing through every glass component of Banjacs’s machine.
The artificers ceased work a moment as the impact shook the chamber, but Banjacs’s own shouting whipped them back to it. The inventor might as well not even have noticed that the city was under attack.
‘If you have somewhere to go or people you would be with,’ Stenwold addressed the two students with him, ‘then go. Nothing’s keeping you here.’
Eujen Leadswell’s idealistic indignation had retreated into an iron core deep within him. ‘No, Master Maker, I’ll stay.’ And it was plain that the Wasp would stay there with him. Stenwold could not decide whether he would rather have Averic just get out of his sight, or whether remaining where an eye could be kept on him was the best thing.
‘Banjacs!’ he shouted, as another, more distant explosion ruptured somewhere out beyond the walls. ‘How long?’
The old man had been up a stepladder, refitting a rack of metal tubes that looked like miniature organ pipes, after two abortive attempts had so far failed to coax any life out of his machine at all. At Stenwold’s words, he jumped down, looking about him wildly.
‘Get off the machine, you fools!’ he shouted at the artificers, as though they had not been scurrying there to his explicit instructions a moment before. He gave them scant time to scramble clear before fitting the last components back into place and taking a large step back.
Still nothing happened, and Stenwold was about to curse the man furiously, when Eujen pointed upwards. The great glass tubes that formed the lightning engine’s main body were now glowing with a pale light, a mere reflection of the enormous storm imprisoned down in Banjacs’s cellar.
‘It’s ready! At last, it’s ready!’ the inventor whooped, a young man again for just a moment. ‘My machine is at your service, Maker.’ As he rounded on Stenwold, there was enough passion in those eyes to spark tears, but also a sanity as though the completion of his long-awaited project had given something back to him that he had been missing for many years.
‘Messenger!’ Stenwold called instantly, and a Fly-kinden who had been watching all this activity with utter vacant bafflement was instantly before him, glad to find himself of some use.
‘Go to the Great Ear and tell them to sound,’ the War Master ordered. ‘Now! Let’s get our pilots out of the air.’
The Fly-kinden was off in a moment, wings taking him straight up and through the gaping skylight that would serve as the aperture of Banjacs’s great weapon.
‘Let us only be in time,’ Stenwold added, so quietly that perhaps only the two students overheard him.
There was a shout from the doors, and a moment later they were kicked in. The body of a Company soldier fell through them and, the next second, a band of men came forcing their way in, snapbows and swords in hand, with a burn-scarred Beetle leading the charge.
Forty
There was fighting further down the line. Straessa could see that the troops to her far left were engaged in melee already, and that did not bode well at all. Her own maniple and its neighbours seemed to have fallen into an uneasy stand-off, the Imperial troops still reforming but refusing either to commit to the fray or just to go away. Straessa’s people were still shooting bolts at them, letting the Wasps know that they were still within range, but Gerethwy was reporting little harm done.
‘Well now,’ he said at Straessa’s shoulder, studying them again through his glass. ‘I think we’re about to get the hammer, frankly.’
‘Tell me.’
‘You can see how they’ve a mass of Airborne there — and their infantry has formed into smaller detachments, a bit like ours really only rather more of them.’ He sounded overly at ease, as if at pains to seem casual. Given his usual effortless calm, she read volumes of emotion into that. ‘They have a whole load of Spider- kinden skirmishers too, some sort of Ants and some Scorpions, but they’re getting them all in better order this time. I think…’ he coughed away a little dust, or that was the impression he tried hard to give, ‘I think they’re ready for us now.’
‘I don’t reckon we could do all that shifting and changing,’ Straessa remarked philosophically. It was dawning on everyone that everything up until now — the Wasp dead, the repulsed charges — had barely bloodied the Second
