Brigade closed into a defensive formation, the equalized outlaws of Grimhope that had been held in reserve at last marching down in columns to lend support. Arinze had fought the Free State both under the flag of the old regime and for the Commonshare — he knew what to expect, as did his soldiers. Canisters of harpoon-like barbs were unloaded from the ammunition train and rolled towards their artillery.
A riding officer galloped up to the marshal. ‘Gun-boxes, compatriot marshal. Advancing from the east.’
‘Ride to the battery,’ ordered Arinze. ‘Tell the artillery captains to concentrate their fire on those royal war bodies. Halt them before they get to our lines.’
After the artillery crews had resighted their cannons and fired the first ranging shots it would have taken an observant eye on a telescope to notice that the four war frames seemed surprisingly resilient to the barbs of their canister fire. Or that explosions on the downs to the east were mirroring the explosions around the giant steammen — exactly where they would be falling if they were passing unhindered through the war frames.
Captain Flare jumped onto the dying monarch’s chest, the steel plates flexing under the impact of his dense fey bones. Oliver was quick behind him, climbing up handholds in the metal. The Whisperer stayed in the lee of the broken war body, muttering with the effort of creating the living illusion of steammen war bodies, a slightly different angle of view needed for every bystander in Rivermarsh. A roar of fury behind them indicated that the mountain of flesh that was now Tzlayloc had finally discovered the trick that had been played on him.
Flare gazed across at the terrible creature. He did not see the Chairman of the First Committee, or Jacob Walwyn, or any threat to Jackals worthy of his guardsman’s oath, he did not even see the betrayer of his fey people’s hopes for freedom. He saw the monster that had strung up his son like a rabbit to be skinned and used as a lure. Flare leapt down from the wrecked war frame and met Tzlayloc’s charge — Oliver swore the ground shook as the Special Guardsman ran.
‘Oliver.’
The Whisperer was climbing up the war body, his shape flickering back and forth from bronzed warrior to his true form.
‘Oliver.’ It was not the Whisperer speaking — it was King Steam. The steamman looked in a bad way, the right side of his body crushed underneath the crumpled pilot guard, the left pierced by bone-sword strikes and scarred by acid trails.
‘Your Majesty, your knights are coming for you.’
‘The hardest part of being a monarch is knowing the time of your own death,’ said King Steam.
‘Your people can save you.’
The King had barely heard Oliver. ‘How else can a route for the new king be prepared?’
Oliver pulled at the frame but it was too badly mangled; removing it by violence would tear the steamman apart.
‘Stop trying to save me, young softbody,’ whispered King Steam. ‘Instead, save both our races. The Wildcaotyl feed on souls and the worship of their kind, on the very life of the earth. The souls are of Jackals and the Free State and the Wildcaotyl need the bones of the earth to drain them; when you move along the Circle you move through the bones of the earth. We are the songs of stardust, Oliver, and like all insects the Wildcaotyl are drawn to our flame. Snuff out the flame…’
Snuff out the flame!
Captain Flare was surrounded by a sea of Tzlayloc’s devils, more and more of them emerging from that deformed body. Flare smashed and crushed the creatures, so covered in blood and the insects’ perverted pulp that he looked like a crimson golem come out of the kiln. Broken Wildcaotyl littered the field, swarms of their brethren climbing the wall of corpses to hurl themselves at the Special Guardsman.
Captain Flare was just one man. Soon his fey flesh began to weaken. His rain of punches slowed as more and more of the Wildcaotyl impaled and scraped at his iron body with their claws.
Oliver extended his senses over the battlefield, reaching for the bones of the earth, but there was so much evil to ignore. Parliament’s forces were wavering as they clashed against the disciplined ranks of the Third Brigade, too few professional soldiers and too many amateur street fighters and Carlist rebels filling out their companies’ lists. The steammen knights were bogged down amidst the Wildcaotyl horde while ranks of metal-fleshers and First Brigade reinforcements pinned down any scattered Special Guardsmen who had not fled Rivermarsh for freedom. But underneath all the confusion the lattice of the earth’s leylines still throbbed, weak and thin after being drained and tapped by worldsingers on both sides.
Around Tzlayloc’s misshapen form the lines were distorted and diffuse, the power of the Wildcaotyl a weight on the surface of the world that she could barely support. Now Oliver saw it, the pain and horror of the battlefield being channelled through the bones of the world, the earth a sponge soaking up the blood and souls for the Wildcaotyl to sup on, each new morsel allowing more of them to uncoil through the cracks in the world. The essence of the Jackelians was being destroyed like coke thrown into a furnace, with the world the insects’ boiler, an engine to power their insane mission for calling down their unholy high gods.
‘Oliver,’ hissed the Whisperer. ‘Ware the enemy.’
At the foot of the fallen war frame a wave of Wildcaotyl demons were clambering up the steamman weapon, but Oliver did not hear the Whisperer’s warning — his attention was spreading out along the lattice of leylines, travelling along the bones of the world.
The Whisperer swore. These things were hard to fool, inhuman, their minds warped flesh that had been unnaturally multiplied from the hive of Tzlayloc’s body. Their dreams were cold alien things. He focused. With snarls of anger the creatures fell upon each other, seeing Special Guardsmen rather than their own foul forms, tearing into each other.
Oblivious to the carnage being inflicted at the foot of the King’s war body, Oliver started to realign the leylines around him, reforming and re-knitting the strength of the land, drawing the power into himself, a trickle at first — then a stream, then a torrent. Worldsingers on both sides of the battlefield fainted as the source of their wizardry disappeared, their hexes and spells falling apart even as they called them. There seemed an endless reservoir inside Oliver now, a well without an end to soak away the earth’s power. At the edge of the battlefield he could feel the Shadow Bear’s rage simmering at the intervention. Legitimate though, thought Oliver. The poor little fey boy was making good.
Below, the Wildcaotyl fighting each other were weakening, their mosquito barb into the repast of Jackals blocked. Tzlayloc realized the source of the threat as the shapes breeding inside his skin dried up, cracking and halting in stillbirth. Roaring he turned, wading through steammen knights and his own Wildcaotyl children without care, the mass of his horde heeding his call and breaking away from the steammen, flooding towards the fallen monarch’s shell. Captain Flare’s body lay in the snow behind them, his clothes ripped to pieces, his muscles scarred and purple. The Captain of the Guard was no more.
Above Rivermarsh the snow clouds had partially cleared, revealing a blue sky filled with drifting aerostats, their control lines cut and helpless before the whims of wind and weather. The Wildcaotyl were losing their ability to reshape the land now, to impose the cold perfection of the hive on Jackals. The false shadows of the steammen war frames flickered out of existence as the Whisperer turned his attention towards the wave of creatures heading towards him. Wildcaotyl stumbled and scrambled as they felt themselves plunged back into the icy angleless realm they had been exiled to, but there were too many for the feybreed’s illusion to hold.
Beneath his boots Oliver felt the King’s war body tremble. Had his interference with the earth’s power caused a floatquake? Surely not. What he was doing was only a variation of what the worldsingers did, tempering the earth’s passion to control the land that could be pushed towards the heavens on her temper. Earth fountained up in front of Tzlayloc, a geyser of molten worldstuff rising as tall as the chairman of the First Committee and showering burning rocks across the Wildcaotyl. The shambling mountain of flesh that had been Jacob Walwyn fell back, the spray flaming across the children of Xam-ku that had been birthed out of his tissue.
Something else was coming, surfing a wave of the earth’s fury. Oliver felt the bones of the world vibrate, his reformed lattice swept away as a tsunami of earthflow poured out of the hole, sweeping him aside, shattering against the feeding Wildcaotyl. Leylines reformed around the battlefield, impossible complex shapes, swirling around a white sphere hovering before Tzlayloc.
‘Sweet Circle,’ hissed the Whisperer.
Oliver felt a burning on his hip. His two belt pistols were glowing, pulsing to the rhythm of the sphere. ‘The Hexmachina.’
