‘Won’t have much need for a pacifist on these ramparts either when the blood gets flowing.’
‘You might be surprised,’ said Daunt.
It was the tragedy of Daunt’s old calling. The science of synthetic morality had detailed volumes dedicated to the history of warfare, for if you didn’t understand such a terrible force, how could you ever hope to stop it? All the factors and facets that went into causing conflicts, from political tensions to resource scarcity to familial jealousies among ruling elites. All distilled down to equations and formulae that could be manipulated and altered towards peace by the church, nudging a faction here, prodding its opposing party there. Daunt could see the branches of probabilities and possibilities narrowing to a single, inevitable conclusion. Either the race of man would survive or the sea-bishops would. This time, peace would only come with one race’s complete victory over the other.
Morris left for a minute and came back holding a helmet identical to the one he was wearing, a long helm with a nosepiece made of the same light ceramic-like substance as the chain mail.
‘Not for me,’ said Daunt. ‘I will feel too much like a soldier if I wear it.’
‘You’ll look like a corpse if you don’t,’ said Morris, indicating the back. There was a small rubber eyepiece and mask with a ceramic air tank on the helm’s neck cover that could slide up a central rail and down in front of the face. ‘There are dirt-gas vents all around the shore-line. The wind blows the wrong way and you’re going to be choking on your own guts when the gill-necks arrive. And that’s if the Advocacy doesn’t use war gas first.’
Daunt reluctantly took the helm and fitted it over his head. At least it reflected the heat of the high sun above. I wonder what my old parishioners would say if they could see their parson now?
‘There’s the mayor of the city, Rafael Ligera,’ said Morris, nodding towards a local.
Accompanied by a phalanx of the red-armoured runners, the mayor was advancing on a command platform in the centre of the keep, markers being nudged around the table by staff with wooden sweepers. The tall politician strode into their midst, broad shoulders carrying his chain mail across a ramrod straight back. But it wasn’t the mayor’s orders that would dictate the opening actions of the siege; those would be dispatched by the Court of the Air up in the crater of the ancient volcano. Dispatched along with the Court’s u-boats now patrolling the thermal wall protecting the island, dispatched with aerospheres manoeuvring in the sky above the city. Deadly-looking weapon assemblies hung connected to the bottom of the globular airships, rocket racks and dishes of varying sizes with lethal-looking needles emerging from their parabolas. Behind the command table, citizen-soldiers wearing bulbous leather helmets with built-in speakers and voice trumpets sat at a bank of communication consoles, receiving the observations from the Court’s eyes and ears in the sea and sky, relaying them to the staff adjusting the position of markers on the table. Pieces for the gill-neck fleet approaching and the disposition of the town’s defenders, others for the Court’s small fleet of submersibles and squadrons of darting airships. It was as though Daunt was watching a game of chess being played out. Easy to be dispassionate about the siege now, before the first exchange of fire had been traded. Before too long this will feel all too real.
As if the defenders had been waiting for the mayor’s arrival before commencing hostilities, the volcano crater exploded in facsimile of an eruption, rocks sent spewing outwards. The roar echoing from the mount was deafening down on the city ramparts — the Circle preserve anyone inside the Court of the Air’s hidden base… or a good pair of ear plugs. Daunt marvelled at the scale of the Court’s ingenuity. He had never seen a real volcanic eruption before, but then, neither had many of the skeletons in the graveyard of vessels rusting on the bottom of the ocean on the Isla Furia’s limits. None of the mariners who had sailed too close to the island had been likely to quibble about the effects as tonnes of superheated boulders began raining down around their decks.
Spouts of water fountained up beyond the thermal barrier; seemingly random patterns, but no doubt closely targeted on the advancing position of the Advocacy’s underwater armada. Rocks came out faster than the eye could follow, burning specks leaving ghosts of their trajectory against Daunt’s retina. Extra smoke was being vented from the Court’s gas mining operation and transaction-engine chamber, and the ground around the base of the mountain trembled with the fury of the magma launchers’ volleys.
For five minutes the fusillade roared out unopposed. Then, beyond the thermal barrier, the sea began to bubble and fume as Advocacy war craft surfaced. Daunt examined the surfacing fleet through the lens of a telescope borrowed from the command table. They were obviously submersibles, but unlike the Kingdom’s u-boat force, the craft had none of the form necessary to preserve a little slice of surface dwelling life beneath the waves. The gill-neck craft were closer to vast ironclad warships travelling beneath the depths. Superstructures the size of citadels with cannons and turrets and decks open to the sea; mortars and bombards mounted in swivelling domes while crews of gill-neck gunners let the water sluice off their decks, carrying with it seaweed and schools of fish that had been swimming moments before across the fleet’s control towers. The designs of the vessels were a curious mix of the brutally functional lines of warships combined with ornamental carvings and intricate hull sculptures. Hull plates camouflaged with the patterning of tropical fish and canon mountings wrapped with cast metal octopus tentacles. If beauties these were, it was a savage beauty.
At least a hundred of the underwater war vessels surfaced within Daunt’s line of vision, and their guns didn’t stay silent for long. The crash of cannons swelled into a near continuous rumble of thunder — answered with plumes of explosions from the volcano slopes and treeline, the Isla Furia’s beaches shattered in a salvo of fire and shrapnel. The towering rise of the volcano shielded the Nuyokians from the worst of the invaders’ barrage, warm liquid from the lake raining down as shells landed in the waters beyond the town.
The sea thrashed beyond the thermal barrier, water frothing and bubbling as the gill-necks expended underwater projectiles and torpedoes by the tonne trying to destroy the devices creating the heat field. Daunt was no engineer, but even he knew they weren’t going to break it that easily.
Given targets unshielded by the sea, the volcano’s spitting fury had swelled to a crescendo, rocks spinning out towards the surfaced fleet, passages traced with fiery spirals, contrails of dark volcanic dust marking their wake. The projectiles disappeared, tiny motes in the sky, followed by explosions flowering across the fleet. The volcano’s hidden launchers were firing with a rapidity that no natural eruption could match. The Court had abandoned their base’s camouflage as a natural phenomenon, launching projectiles so fast that their launch pipes were echoing with hollow reverberations, a stuttering expulsion of rocky mass. To the sailors and marines on the Advocacy fleet, the missiles must resemble gull motes swelling to the size of houses, a brief prayer to the mother of the ocean that they would land somewhere else, then their fierce impact, tossing the massive war machines in the sea. The impact on the gill-neck armada was apparent now, the rain of high velocity rocks striking the enemy hulls, flying vessel fragments and explosions of debris audible from within the town’s walls. A tinny booming as if the invaders were beating drums on their approach.
From back inside the city came a jarring screech. Daunt turned to see a pair of gigantic cannons being pulled down the translucent streets, a caterwauling rising from their steel wheels, eight on either side of their recoil carriages. Articulated barrels stretched over ninety feet, with each of the red-tipped shells following in a long ammunition train standing taller than Daunt. These two giant artillery pieces were clearly of the city rather than the Court, the barrels raised on hydraulic struts with carriages constructed to be anchored on steel turntables waiting either side of the gates. Shrine keepers walked backwards in front of the rumbling monstrosities, swinging globes of scented oil and tossing holy liquid and blessings over the advancing gunnery. The antique artillery pieces were every bit a match for the ornamentation crafted into the Advocacy war cruisers halted outside the thermal barrier. Both barrels gleamed evilly as dragonhead jaws, angelic-winged women coiled around each piece, while their wheels turned as gargoyles with grinning, leering metal teeth as spokes.
Morris cursed and one of the Nuyokian soldiers on the line clapped Morris’s back between the shoulder blades. ‘Is Santo Ruidoso and Santa Bocainfierno, yes? They speak for the city today.’
‘It’s not those two howitzers that worry me, it’s the automatics you got manning them.’ He pointed to the chains being used to haul the pair, each the weight of anchor chains and borne by thirty to forty metal forms lugging the tonnage forward. It was more of the same automatics the Court set to work in their volcano’s gas mine, the hulking machine-men — as large as they were — clearly straining against the mass of the town’s artillery.
‘Who better to pull those two brutes?’ said Daunt.
‘The cardinal rule of soldiering,’ said Morris. ‘You never bring automatics within a mile of real battle. They haven’t got the brains for it, see.’
Daunt frowned. ‘I believe you’ll find the steamman knights would beg to differ on that point.’
‘I’m not talking about King Steam’s lads,’ said Morris. ‘I’m talking about the kind of automatic that clank fresh out of a Kingdom mill with the badge of one of our industrial lords stamped across its shiny bum-cheeks. You can train their kind to simple tasks with enough repetition, but stick them in a fighting regiment and as strong and as armoured as they be, you’ll end up with as many casualties on your own side as the enemy’s.’ He pointed to the
