bun’s been well and truly baked. It’s not if we fall, it’s when.’
Daunt felt his soul shrivel at the ex-soldier’s estimation of their odds. We have to buy Charlotte and the commodore the time to reach the seed-city.
Morris pulled back the safety bolt of his rifle. ‘On the plus side, I’m going to get my choice of Advocacy heads to put bullets into. One for every day the arseholes had me as their slave, see. You might want to be getting off the wall sharpish.’
‘A priest’s training includes physical healing, as well as tending to our parishioners’ souls and mental wellbeing.’
Morris pointed down to the aid station tents set up close to the wall, rows of stretchers and tables bearing bone saws and tubs of boiling tar to quickly seal wounds, all lined up incongruously across the neat lawns of the nearest row of hexagonal buildings. ‘There’ll be work for you soon enough, then.’
His words were cut short by the wailing of sirens coming from inside the town, no obvious sign of the source, but the noise seemed to shake through the transparent streets from every point.
One of the nearby locals tapped his nose and indicated his gas mask. ‘Air, for face.’
Morris pulled down the gas mask on the back of his helmet and Daunt followed suit.
‘There she goes.’ Morris’s voice sounded muffled beneath the ceramic air drum and rubber visor, great clouds of yellow-tinged gas seeping down from midway up the volcano’s slopes, rolling across the shore and making a fog across the sea. Whatever damage had been inflicted inside the crater, the Court’s facilities were intact enough to release their final defensive barrier. As a cornered squid releases a mist of ink, so the volcano was putting out the shroud of poisonous death that accompanied a genuine eruption. Flags lifted up along the wall to monitor the direction the wind was blowing. Luckily for the city, the breeze seemed to be carrying the poison gas along the shoreline and out to sea. Unfortunately for the islanders, Daunt mused, the Advocacy fleet wasn’t a convoy of merchantmen chancing their luck against the Isla Furia’s ferocious reputation. The landing force would no doubt be wearing water breathers, and the poison gas would be of nuisance value only. It did have the effect of concealing the Court’s defences along the shoreline, though. When the initial sounds of battle began to drift across the lake, the sights of the fighting were completely enveloped by high waves of rolling poison. Along the beach, different strands of coloured smoke began to mix with the yellow war gas, trenches laying down smoke cover, other forces signalling with smoke canisters. The two massive cannons behind the city walls responded to the coded signals, pounding out volley after volley, the results of their work hidden from view, but audible from the distant whoop of detonations. It was a surreal sight, the mist and clouds veined as though a rainbow, all sounds of conflict distorted by it. The distant fighting continued for over an hour and there seemed no let up in the gas — as if the volcano — having its fire silenced, was pouring all its fury into this boundless toxic veil.
Signalling the collapse of the shore’s defensive line, the lake’s ocean lock burst open in a massive explosion, pieces of concrete blown across the lake, a deadly shower of wreckage sweeping across the battlements. A second after the detonation, the screams of pain and terror from the defenders who had taken the shockwave reached Daunt. Some townspeople had been flung off the wall, others maimed and ripped apart. Behind the city’s wall, one of the clean gleaming white porcelain towers stood with its top two storeys shaved off by the scythe of rubble.
‘This is how it begins,’ whispered Daunt. Then he shook himself. It was almost as if he had been possessed by the old gods again when he had spoken.
‘Reckon you’re not wrong,’ said Morris, resting his rifle on the battlements. There were two little metal legs underneath the barrel, and he had opened them up to rest the gun against the stone, swivelling the stock experimentally. ‘You been through anything like this before?’
‘Jago,’ said the ex-parson. ‘I was on Jago when it was invaded.’
‘Then you know what to expect.’
‘I presume you’ve tasted similar when you were in the regiments?’
‘Once.’
‘So you showed the good wit to get out,’ said Daunt. ‘Sickened by the senselessness of it all?’
‘That wasn’t why I deserted,’ said Morris. The convict’s body language closed up. ‘Eyes front. They’re coming. Can you smell them? Can you taste them? Bloody gill-necks.’
Out towards the sea the wind had changed direction, war gas drifting across the lake, providing the advancing Advocacy forces with a haze screen of cover. The Court’s own deadly cloud was working against them now. Daunt saw a couple of runners outside the battlements, sprinting down the ground between the wall and near shore of the lake, pegging small triangular pennants into the dirt. The effective killing range of our rifles, so our defenders don’t expend ammunition needlessly. There wasn’t much cover in the stretch of land between the lake and the city — wooden jetties for fishing boats, a few shacks for storing nets, eeling skiffs lying beached in the reeds. Apart from the runners desperately marking out the ground, the rest of Nuyok were sheltering behind their town’s thick, tall walls.
Daunt quickly tipped up his gas mask and wiped the salty sweat off his forehead before it could sting his eyes again. Even the wind on the island was hot, playing against his skin as if it had been blown off the coals of a Jackelian tavern’s fireplace. Matters were about to get devilishly hotter. Out on the border of the lake, a rhythmic clanking filled the air as hundreds of rolling-pin tanks began to rise up out of the lime-coloured waters, tracks at either end of the metal vehicles dragging them off the lake bed and up onto the surface. Almost before the landing craft had cleared the surface, the guns studding their armour spewed out a hail of fire. They were moving up in a coordinated assault formation — some halting for hatches at their rear to fall down and disgorge marines, others coming to a standstill in the shadows of the battlements, dozens of weapons bristling up on their maximum elevation and peppering the battlements with shot and shell. These soldiers had come for the long haul, bulbous crystal helmets filled with water connected by hoses to their version of rebreather packs, bodies weighted down with pouches and entrenchment equipment. Protected by the initial landing force, more rolling-pin armour emerged out of the lake waters. Some were dragging spherical cargo containers, others mounted with trench digging prows and siege machinery. The appearance of this assault was met by a hail of fire from the Nuyokians, the roar of their rifles firing a thousand baby rattles shaking in anger. It resounded across the lake like no gunfire Daunt had ever heard before. Not the wood-like splinter of explosive charges being ignited and discarded manually, but a hollow thwacking as the firing bolts in the side of rifles jolted back and forth with the discharge of super-compressed gas. The defenders’ furious response was accompanied by a clockwork clack of ammunition drums rotating on top of the rifles as the city’s militiamen emptied their magazines down onto the ground in front of their home. A fierce drumming echoed from the rolling-pin tanks as rifle balls glanced off their armour. Where the gill-neck marines were out in the open, unloading their siege and entrenching tools from the landing craft, soldiers’ corpses spilled into the dirt and crumpled back into the lake’s reeds.
Behind Daunt, the two long guns of the city were still discharging every few minutes, tossing shells at the stalled battle fleet of the Advocacy as fast as the city gunners could reload shells into the breeches. Daunt ducked as a spray of shots whistled past his head. Morris was keeping down, swivelling his gas gun on its leg mounts and aiming careful bursts at the invaders below, laughing as if the vista of carnage below was a theatre production laid on purely for his amusement. At the receiving end of each spray of bullets, Advocacy soldiers collapsed to the ground with shattered breathing helmets, their crab-shell armour torn and holed. Elements of the landing force were trying to storm the slopes of the volcano, no doubt trying to find elevated positions from where they could shell and snipe at the city below. Fortunately for the Nuyokians, the close-defence mechanisms of the Court of the Air were coming into play. Fake rock fronts were drawing back all across the mountain side, cannons, mortars and banks of rapid-fire rifles emerging into the light of day from camouflaged bunkers, cutting down each wave of Advocacy marines as they attempted to scale the rise.
Stretcher-bearers ran crouched along the length of the battlements, rolling collapsed bodies onto stretchers and manhandling them down the steps towards the surgeons’ tents on the lawns of the nearest towers.
All around Daunt the defenders were intent on murder, focused on killing enough gill-necks for the Advocacy to abandon its beachhead. This is your war, Jethro Daunt, and welcome to it. He bent down and went off to see how many of the wounded he could save.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
